In Any Lifetime: A Novel, page 6
“Are you all right?” Eva asks.
“Fine,” Jonas croaks, shaking away the memory. He flips the coin, its patina glinting in the light of the pub as it tumbles back into his hand. “Heads or tails?”
“Tails,” she shrugs. Jonas reveals the coin in his palm. Heads. Eva grimaces. “Too bad for me.”
“Not exactly. You see, the Many Worlds Theory holds that there is now a universe—a parallel universe or, if you prefer, an ‘alternate reality’—where the coin came up tails.”
Eva furrows her brow. “That’s never made much sense to me. What you’re describing would lead to an incalculable number of realities. If the universe favors efficiency, it doesn’t make sense that a new one is created every time someone flips a coin.”
“You’re right. The coin flip is just a convenient illustration I use with laypeople.”
She rears back. “Laypeople? You wound me, sir,” she says in mock offense.
“But you happen to be absolutely right,” Jonas continues. “The multiverse does prefer efficiency, which it achieves by limiting branch points—instances where circumstances could go right or left and, therefore, birth a new universe—by constraining the number of times that it happens.”
“How?” she asks.
“By favoring certain outcomes. Which limits the total number of realities in the multiverse from the impossibly infinite to manageably so.”
“And how do you know that?”
He tells her about his Many Worlds Proof. The Nobel Prize. The night in Stockholm. The accident. He doesn’t know how he manages to get it all out and not have his voice tremble.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. There’s more than sincerity in her voice. Jonas senses experience. Eva has trod this unfortunate emotional territory.
“I devised a means to travel between realities,” he says. “My hope is to find one where Amanda is still alive.”
“Your hope? I would think there would be . . . well, I would think there would be a lot. I mean, in a universe of infinite universes.”
“Yes. But you’re forgetting something.”
Eva brightens. “The universe favors . . .”
“Certain outcomes, yes.”
Eva takes a pull from her drink, evidently thinking hard on all that Jonas has unloaded on her. “What happens,” she ventures, “if you find a world where your wife is alive . . . but so are you?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I think it’s unlikely, given the universal bias I mentioned.”
“But what if?” she insists.
“Then . . .” Jonas’s voice trails off. “I guess that would fall under the category of a ‘quality problem.’”
“It would certainly make for the world’s most interesting love triangle.”
“Maybe I’ll write a book about it,” he jokes. “Get a Pulitzer to go with my Nobel.”
Eva is still working to absorb all this, wrestling with whether to accept what he’s told her and what she’s observed on his forearm or to hold fast to common sense. “I can’t even begin to fathom the energy expenditure required to jump realities.”
“Of course you can,” he offers. “Consider where we are.”
“Switzerland.”
“Meyrin, Switzerland,” he specifies.
“The Large Hadron Collider,” she realizes aloud, the words tumbling out in a whisper.
He points at her—exactly—before saying, “My body is now suffused with quantum energy. The process essentially unanchored me from my reality, allowing me to slip into yours.”
Her beer bottle empty, Eva—saucer eyed—reaches forward to drain Jonas’s. “If that’s true”—Jonas can see her mind grasping—“then why aren’t you continuing to . . . ‘slip,’ to use your word? What keeps you in this reality?” But she doesn’t wait for Jonas to answer as her understanding gains momentum. “In fact, what’s to keep you from slipping realities forever?”
“This.” Jonas holds up his hand, showing her his ring. “I call it my ‘tether.’ It’s the only piece of nonorganic matter that can make the trip with me.”
“Nonorganic?”
“Anything synthetic,” Jonas confirms. “I even had to have my fillings taken out and replaced with silver.”
“But why?” she asks.
“Remember, we’re dealing with radiation, essentially. Quantum radiation, yes, but still. Different types of matter absorb and retain radiation differently. When I first started out, all my computer models were . . .” He searches for the word.
“Totally wack?” Eva offers.
“To use the technical term.” This time, they both share a smile. A moment. “In any case, the model results changed when I only factored in organic materials.”
“Except for your ‘tether.’”
Jonas points to it, resting on his finger. “It’s different from everything else because it’s regulating the radiation in question. As long as I’m wearing it, I’m rooted in whichever universe I’m standing in.”
“And if you take it off?”
Jonas flutters his hand upward, fingers wagging. “I move through universes like a feather on the wind.”
“And, what, you land when you put it back on?”
“Actually, it takes a universe or two to settle.”
“Settle?”
“Like a roulette wheel slowly coming to a complete stop.”
Eva furrows her brow. Taking all this in. Turning it over in her mind, examining the whole impossible, incredible situation from all available angles.
“You’re taking this all very well,” Jonas observes.
Eva barely acknowledges the compliment, still thinking, still probing. “What about your clothes? Paul didn’t mention you showing up naked.”
Jonas plucks at his shirt. “All-natural fibers and materials. Even my shoes.”
“So you’re not carrying any money,” she notes.
“Good point. You’re going to have to pay for our drinks.” They share another flash of connection even in the face of a conversation that seems, at best, on the outer edge of sanity.
“So, your tattoo . . .”
Jonas rolls up his sleeve, turning out his forearm. “The collider needed to be calibrated very precisely.”
“I’d imagine.”
“I couldn’t chance leaving all this to memory, and I needed a way to bring my notes, my calculations, with me. I considered keeping them on cotton parchment, writing with something like squid ink, but that would mean risking losing the formulae, so I employed the obvious solution.”
Eva’s gaze flits across the tattoo. Once again, her eyes spark at the Schrödinger equation at the center of the calculations, the cornerstone of the Many Worlds Theory. “If the Jonas Cullen of . . . of my universe wasn’t a Nobel-winning scientist, I don’t think I’d believe any of this.”
Jonas smiles inwardly, taking some small measure of pride in being a Nobel winner in at least two universes. “What did I win for?” he can’t help but ask.
Eva winces, searching her memory. “Something about the control of particles in entangled states?” she grasps. “But forget about that a second.”
“Forget about winning a Nobel Prize? Sure. No problem.”
“I’m serious,” she insists. “This is serious. I have to ask . . .” She pauses, measuring her next words. “I just . . . I don’t understand why you’d go through all that trouble. I mean, you were risking your life to travel to a reality where you and your wife are both dead.”
Jonas breathes out a sigh. “You strike me as much smarter than that, Dr. Stamper.”
“You’re lost.” The conclusion escapes her in a breath. The conspicuous answer, present all along.
Jonas runs a finger along his tattoo, across the arcane mélange of letters and numbers and symbols, feeling like they have betrayed him. “I thought I’d correctly determined how the LHC needed to be calibrated in order to arrive at the universe where Amanda’s still alive.”
“And how does that work, exactly?”
“It’s highly technical,” he demurs.
“Really?” she says sarcastically. “That’s almost hard to imagine.”
Jonas leans forward and parts his hands. Okay. I’ll play. “I altered the Large Hadron Collider so that it would leak out a small amount of quantum radiation. Radiation is nothing more than the emission of energy in the form of waves. Waves have frequencies. Change the frequency, and you alter the quality of the radiation. Alter the quality of the radiation, and you change the effect it has on the cells of the human body. In this case, mine.”
Eva shakes her head. “I’m afraid you lost me.”
“I did warn you,” he chides playfully.
“Yes, you did.” He catches her staring at him. There’s no mistaking the look on her face as attraction, but Jonas compels himself not to dwell on it.
“Bottom line, I intended to use the quantum radiation to untether myself from my home reality, but in a very specific way. Think of it like letting go of a helium balloon with the intention that it floats up through a skylight.”
“And this theoretical ‘skylight’ leads to a reality where your wife is still alive.”
Jonas feels a pang of disappointment. “I thought I’d located a reality where Amanda was still alive and I wasn’t. Clearly, something was lacking in my calculations, because I originally ended up in a reality where she was already dead.”
Eva seems confused. “Originally?”
He tells her about his arrest, his encounter with Gillard. During the interrogation, Gillard had mentioned Amanda’s “passing.” At the time, Jonas didn’t know he’d reality-slipped, so he thought Gillard was referring to his Amanda, but with the realization that Gillard was from a parallel universe came the conclusion that the Amanda in Gillard’s reality was dead as well.
Jonas recounts the confiscation of his tether and how its loss led him to arrive in this universe. He explains that when he reality-slips, he doesn’t move in space or time: if he’s standing on the third floor of a building that disappears because he swaps universes, he’s liable to plummet to his death—unless, say, a car breaks his fall. Hence his arrival at Dr. Guyer’s hospital.
“So now what?” Eva asks. “What will you do next?”
“I don’t know,” he says, trying not to sound hopeless.
Almost a minute passes. In the silence, the sounds of the bar fill the breach: the indistinct chatter of dozens of overlapping conversations, the chime of glasses being set down on tables, a pop song struggling in vain to be heard over it all. Jonas returns his attention to Eva, and in her eyes he sees a familiar emotion, one he’s seen countless times since Amanda passed away.
It’s pity.
It’s not pity.
Eva stares at Jonas with empathy and the understanding of a fellow traveler on the road of loss. She’s further down that path than he is and recognizes in him a despair akin to hers, which has scarred over with the passage of time. But for Jonas, the loss of Amanda is still fresh. To hear him talk about it is to take in the extent of his grief. However, rather than see it as pathetic, Eva finds it alluring. His sorrow is as pure as his love. Who wouldn’t find such devotion attractive? Who wouldn’t want to be coveted the way Jonas covets Amanda?
“I’m sorry if I seem . . . pathetic,” Jonas says.
“You’re not pathetic,” she says from her depths. “It’s never pathetic to love someone, and it’s certainly not pathetic to mourn them.” She laces her fingers together and brings them to her mouth, contemplating. “And what you’re doing . . . looking for her, risking everything to be with her again . . . it’s heroic.”
She watches as Jonas warms to that idea. Sees him sit up just a little straighter, his flagging resolve recharged by her endorsement. A smile spreads on his face. She’s surprised to find it attractive but instantly sheds the thought. Jonas either has a mental illness, hails from an entirely different universe, or—potentially—both. Still, that smile . . .
Evening has fallen by the time Jonas and Eva exit the pub. The air is crisp and smells like smoldering wood. The buildings’ nighttime illumination only enhances the odd hybrid of European and Japanese architectural styles. Jonas resists the almost overwhelming temptation to ask Eva to summarize the entire history of this alternate world. There will be time enough for that, he reasons. He’ll be able to dive as far down that rabbit hole as he pleases. But he knows he can’t stay in this universe. It no longer has who he’s looking for . . .
“Can I ask you another question?” Eva says, stirring him from this reverie.
“I couldn’t fathom setting a limit, after everything I’ve told you.”
“Well, this one’s kind of delicate.”
“Sounds like the kind of question a psychologist should be asking.” Jonas leans back in his chair. Spreads his hands. Hit me.
“If I understand the Many Worlds Theory correctly, there’s a universe where you and your wife are both alive, where perhaps the accident never even happened.”
“What’s your question?”
She gives him a tremulous glance. In the end, she doesn’t ask a question. “There’s already a world,” she asserts, “where you’re happy.”
“I don’t know what that world looks like.” His voice cracks with emotion. To will himself not to cry, he gazes out at the street, at the flotsam and jetsam of an entire city—representative of an entire world—full of people whose lives have unfolded in an infinite number of ways that differ from those in his home reality. His mind swims with the enormity of it. What had been theoretical for years is now real and tangible, almost beyond his ability to fully comprehend.
“So,” Eva says skeptically, “you’re just going to jump around universes until you find her?”
“I can’t,” Jonas answers. “Eventually, I’ll expend the energy I got from the collider. And that’s assuming I don’t reality-slip into a wheat thresher or some such first.” He feels stress rising, hope descending, as he considers the dangers of his mission. “I ended up in the reality I intended, but it was the wrong one. My math was off somehow, in some way. I need to figure that out first, or I’ll just get lost again.”
“If that’s why you decided to trust me,” she says, “I have to remind you that parallel-universe theory wasn’t my field.”
Jonas cocks his head and gives her a mischievous smirk. “But didn’t you get an A in quantum mechanics?”
That draws an amused look. And Jonas senses a connection, an invisible electricity between them, the type of valence that could form the foundation of a lifelong friendship. The last time he felt such magnetism was five years ago.
FIVE YEARS AGO
The name of the restaurant was unimportant, a neighborhood place in Tribeca that would be out of business within eighteen months. Still, Jonas would never forget it was called Jackson’s. The decor was exposed brick and piping. Apparently the designer’s only artistic vision was to strip away every wall and inch of ceiling, then populate the space with chairs and tables sourced from Architectural Digest and art inspired by postcards from the gift shop at the Museum of Modern Art.
He had been so nervous that before their date, he ran out to a liquor store two blocks from his apartment and bought a bottle of whatever whiskey the man at the register had recommended. He poured it into a glass he had filled with ice and took a generous swallow. The whiskey burned the back of his mouth, shot fire into his chest, and rendered him no less anxious. He stared at the bottle and questioned if it contained any alcohol at all.
But in hindsight, Jonas didn’t need an alcoholic sedative. Just seeing Amanda again was like unwrapping a present. She was light. She was sunshine. Radiant warmth in human form. And she was here. Real. Spending time—time she could spend in an infinite number of ways—with him. His whole life had been devoted to the academic. The theoretical. But she was real.
And she seemed to like him. Jonas had always seen the gulf between art and science as unbreachable, two sides of two very different coins. Never would he have imagined that paintings and quantum mechanics would find a connection, but Amanda had seen it instantly. Their work, she said, required them each to identify patterns and connections. They both labored to conjure reality—the appearance of it at least—from the speculative. His work and her art (as she practiced it) were even bounded by the same inalterable physics. Light. Perspective. The limits of human observation. They were both in the business of understanding and interpreting the marvels of creation.
“What are you working on right now?” she asked.
“Nothing all that interesting,” Jonas promised. “How about you?”
“I’m scouting locations, looking for the next rooftop I’ll paint from, the next ‘vantage point,’ I like to say, because it sounds more impressive,” she added with a touch of self-effacing whimsy. “So what about you?”
“I’m working on a mathematical proof of the existence of parallel universes.” The second the words left his mouth, he regretted them. They sounded ridiculous, esoteric. He drained his wineglass.
“Parallel universes?”
“Have you heard of them?”
She shrugged. “Everyone’s heard of them, I guess. I mean, everyone’s seen the movies. At least one of them, right? I think . . . parallel universes are one of those things everyone’s heard of but never really understands.”
“That’s an accurate way of putting it,” he said.
“But it’s not real. I mean, it’s just theory.” She wrinkled her face with disapproval. “I’m sorry. It sounds like I’m shitting on your work, and that’s absolutely the last thing I want to do.” She paled, catching herself. “I mean—”
Jonas held his hand up. “It’s okay. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It’s weird and even a little silly. I mean, what’s the difference between science and science fiction, right?”
“I think you’re supposed to tell me.”
Jonas tipped his head. Fair point. “Do you have any money in your pockets or your purse?”
