In Any Lifetime: A Novel, page 30
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.
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.
“Nothing.” But Amanda indicts that response with a look. She has always seen through him, seen him better than he can see himself. “Well, not nothing,” he admits. “But now’s not the right time for it. There will be plenty of time later.”
“Whatever it is,” she says, weighing him with a glance, “it’s on your mind.”
He sees no point in denying it. “But not in a bad way. Not in the slightest.”
“Well, there’s something on my mind,” she says. “I haven’t really known how to bring it up.”
“That’s easy,” Jonas shrugs. “Just bring it up.”
“It’s about Victor,” she says.
This reality’s Victor died of pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago. The presence of his corpse on West Fifty-Seventh Street presented yet another conundrum. When the doctors pronounced Jonas well enough to answer questions, he told the police he had no idea whom he had landed on. When they asked how he came to fall from such an apparently great height, Jonas claimed short-term memory loss, transient global amnesia, rather than theorize how passing through multiple universes slowed their descent enough to make survival possible.
With Jonas proving either uncooperative or unreliable—the police couldn’t be sure which—the NYPD ran Victor’s fingerprints without success. A DNA match would be attempted, but it was unlikely to produce results for the same reason that the fingerprint search returned no records. Victor’s biometrics weren’t in any database; he had never been arrested or otherwise associated with law enforcement in this reality. Eventually, a review of his dental records might produce some perplexing questions but only if Victor’s doppelgänger’s dental work matched his own. In any case, Jonas has time to consider his responses in the event that the police return to ask him more questions. He sets the odds of that at fifty-fifty. A coin flip.
“What about Victor?” he asks Amanda. In the hospital, he gave Amanda a truncated version of events: he and Victor both devised the means to travel to parallel universes, and Victor, motivated by a perverse sense of cosmic justice, was trying to stop Jonas from reuniting with her. He left out any mention of the demise of her own doppelgänger.
“Well,” she ventures, “if there was more than one you trying to get back to me . . .” Her voice trails off. During their conversations at Mount Sinai, Amanda understandably struggled to come up with the right words to articulate this strange conundrum. “If there was more than one Jonas trying to reach me, wouldn’t it stand to reason that there would be more than one Victor trying to stop him? I mean, you?”
“I don’t know,” Jonas answers. Apart from the omission of Amanda’s ill-fated counterpart, he would never lie to her. “I don’t know if there are other Victors out there.” He stops walking and takes her hands in his. Not since they exchanged their wedding vows has he spoken to her with such conviction. “What I do know is that I found you again. And no one—in any universe—is ever going to take you away from me.”
A smile blossoms across Amanda’s face. “I can live with that,” she says.
“So can I.”
“But what about other yous?” she asks. “There was already one.”
In the hospital, Jonas had given a lot of thought to a potential legion of Jonases, each one as set on finding Amanda as he had been. The possibility will always exist. That, after all, was the beauty of the multiverse: its penchant for endless possibility.
“Well, if another me were to show up,” he says, thinking of what Eva said to him when they discussed the same question, “then it would certainly make for the world’s most interesting love triangle.”
The thought of Eva surfaces a memory. Jonas digs into his pocket, only now noticing that he happens to be wearing the same pants he wore back at the Spire. He pulls out the Ouroboros patch that Eva sewed for him, cradling it in his fingers, thinking of her. How she risked everything to help him. The feelings she engendered in him. The grief brought on by her dying—twice. The guilt of feeling responsible both times.
“What’s this?” Amanda asks, taking the patch. “It looks like my tattoo. And yours, too, I guess.”
“A friend of mine made this for me,” he says, his voice cracking.
Some instinct pulls his gaze across the street. The sidewalk is choked with tourists and New Yorkers. The steady pulse of Manhattan. Among the throng, Jonas can make out a couple walking arm in arm. A man and a woman. The man wears United States Army Ranger fatigues. Jonas recognizes him from a photograph in a faculty office at Von Braun University. As he walks, the woman rests her head on his shoulder, laughing at whatever it is he just said.
Eva looks happy.
“Is everything okay?” Amanda asks.
“Yes,” Jonas says, staring as Eva and the man she loves disappear into the crowd. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”
Amanda takes his hand and leads him on. “Let’s get you home.”
“Sounds good. It’s been a while.”
As they walk, Jonas looks to the night sky and considers the stars in their multitude. Their light—hundreds, thousands of years old—winks down on him. For each one, he imagines a universe populated with an almost countless congregation of souls. He thinks of their lives and their deaths, their hopes and dreams, their crushing losses and disappointments. Some will die without ever having made a mark upon their world. Others will conjure breathtaking works of art—plays, songs, paintings, poems, symphonies—from nothing. Like Jonas, a select few will give birth to insights that will challenge their very perception of reality. All will experience the exquisite torture, the brutal blessing, of what it means to be human. Each of these lives is its own universe.
Tonight, Jonas and Amanda will return home and try to make another.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some stories want to be told.
My initial notes for what has evolved to become this novel are dated February 26, 2013. The journey has been a long one, and I’ve been blessed with the help of many fellow travelers along the way.
Meyash Prabhu was the first to dig into my pile of work, extricate this story, and find it worth pursuing.
Amanda would have been largely absent from the narrative but for the wise counsel of Palak Patel, Elishia Holmes, and Mike DeLuca.
As they have for well over a decade, Cliff Roberts and Wendy Kirk served as both traveling companions and guides, helping me navigate challenging terrain despite the wide variety of accidents and storms and earthquakes the universe threw at me.
My longtime, long-suffering assistant C. M. Landrus—a wonderful and wonderfully talented writer in her own right—was the first reader I imposed on. Her sharp-eyed observations and insights were as invaluable as a simile or metaphor. (Inside joke.)
My former book agent, Erin Malone at WME, also provided much appreciated feedback and encouragement. Anthony Mattero at CAA took up the baton without costing us even a millisecond in the race. (With apologies to C. M. for the metaphor.)
The remarkable Season Kent graciously donated her time and plied her trade as one of the best music supervisors in film and television—and now prose. She’s one of the best people I know, and I desperately miss working with her.
Some stories want to be told.
But not all stories want to be published. Finding the right home for this one was challenging and at times seemed impossible. It was during one of those moments when it seemed that this story might not see the light of day that novelist Alex Segura volunteered his advice and assistance. Alex and I are familiar with each other from our respective work in the comic book industry, but his help was practically the equivalent of coming to the aid of a complete stranger. The greatest mitzvahs are those done for people one barely knows, with no potential for reciprocation. Through his generosity of spirit, Alex introduced me to Chantelle Aimée Osman at Lake Union. Chantelle was the first editor to recognize what this book was and, more importantly, what it could be. She is, as she said on our very first phone call, this book’s first fan. The gift of her support and encouragement is one I can never adequately repay.
Among the many things Chantelle brought to this project, perhaps the greatest is the involvement of its editor, Jason Kirk. His notes, insights, and line edits elevated every page. He even served as my de facto science adviser. Pairing me with an editor who happens to have more than an armchair understanding of the cosmos is just one example of Chantelle’s prodigious brilliance.
Chantelle and Jason, along with eagle-eyed and OCD-in-the-best-possible-of-ways copy editor Megan Westberg and proofreader Jenna Justice, and our sensitivity reader Mary Ruth Govindavari, have all guided me through the unfamiliar waters of prose with patience and grace. If this novel reads as such—and not like the media with which I am more comfortable—it is entirely due to their efforts. I will be forever grateful for everything they’ve taught me.
In addition, production manager Angela Elson indulged me with similar patience and counsel and, I suspect, was instrumental with Chantelle in affording me a deadline extension when I really needed one.
Finally, domo arigato gozaimasu to my friend Kiyomi Fisher, who gamely jumped in at the proverbial last minute to clean up my osoroshii—horrendous—Japanese. Any mistakes contained herein are wholly mine.
Some stories want to be told.
The easiest part of telling this one was writing about Jonas’s feelings for Amanda. All I had to do was think of my wife, Tara. If Jonas and Amanda’s child turns out to be half the person our daughters Lily and Sara are, then Jonas and Amanda are truly blessed indeed. I love the three of you far, far too much. You’ve made me the luckiest husband and father in any lifetime.
Best,
Marc Guggenheim
Encino, California
August 2023
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2023 Greg Pak
Marc Guggenheim grew up on Long Island, New York, and earned his law degree from Boston University. After over four years in practice, he left law to pursue a career in television.
Today, Guggenheim is an Emmy Award–winning writer who writes for multiple mediums including television, film, video games, comic books, and new media. His work includes projects for such popular franchises as Percy Jackson, Star Wars, Call of Duty, Star Trek, and Planet of the Apes.
Guggenheim currently lives in Encino, California, with his wife, two daughters, and a small menagerie of pets. Keep up to date on his latest projects with LegalDispatch, a weekly newsletter where he shares news and notes about writing, comics, and the entertainment industry, at https://marcguggenheim.substack.com.
