Multiversum Page 7

  Jenny leaped up, grabbed her diary, and stormed out of the room. A few determined strides took her to the top of the stairs. When she got downstairs, she walked into the kitchen and flung her diary into the recycling bin.

  ‘I’ve had it!’ she shouted. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying.

  Over the past several days, she’d been too easily distracted at school. She had been scolded the day before for looking dreamily out the window while her maths teacher was explaining an important equation. And Jenny had received a C on her history test — a C, from a straight-A student.

  Might as well throw myself into my schoolwork, she thought as she sat down at her desk. It’ll take my mind off the fact that I’ve become a sad little mental patient who hears voices and thinks they’re real.

  Before opening her maths textbook, Jenny took one last look out the window, up at the sky.

  ‘How could I have ever believed that it was real …’ she said aloud, as she watched the clouds piling up and becoming dark and threatening.

  She couldn’t imagine that, outside the window overlooking the street, the cool Melbourne air was the same air that Alex was breathing.

  Multiverse. When Marco uttered that word, Alex hung up as if by reflex. His hands were shaking, and the tangled mass of information was stubbornly resisting all his attempts to order his thoughts. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had travelled halfway around the world to be stood up for a date.

  He started walking along the Esplanade as the wind picked up and shook the branches of the trees lining the beach. With his hands in his pockets, he walked along briskly, heading nowhere in particular. He’d travelled all that way just to prove to himself that Jenny really existed, and now he had to accept the fact that she lived in a parallel dimension.

  ‘Of course she does!’ he exclaimed, and then stopped short to catch his breath. A few passers-by eyed him curiously. The expression on his face was a clear snapshot of the confusion that reigned inside him at that moment.

  Then, a second later, his vision suddenly clouded over.

  ‘My mum gets angry whenever I talk about us …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I love you.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘I can’t wait to grow up.’

  ‘Will you come and get me?’

  ‘Of course, Jenny.’

  Alex opened his eyes wide, finding himself face to face with an astonished old man who was walking past. He’d remembered something. In what hidden corner of his mind had he found that conversation? How deep had he gone? Both he and Jenny, as small children: it was a vague memory of childish voices, or possibly nothing but a fantasy. But the two of them were together.

  Alex pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed the green button to redial Marco’s number.

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ he said in a determined voice.

  ‘Then you believe me,’ Marco sniggered with satisfaction.

  ‘I never said I believed you.’

  ‘They call it the Theory of the Multiverse,’ Marco went on. ‘It’s a set of alternative universes outside our space-time continuum.’

  Alex hesitated before responding. ‘You don’t expect me to swallow all this, do you?’

  ‘You’ll swallow it, believe me, you’ll swallow it … but just a tiny bite at a time.’

  ‘So let me see if I get this … I was there, she was there, we were talking to each other through our thoughts but we were in two different worlds?’

  ‘More or less. If you like, two different realities of the same world.’

  ‘How many realities do you think exist? How many Melbourne piers and lampposts do you think there are?’

  ‘For all I know, there might be an infinite number of dimensions. But now we’re in the realm of pure hypothesis.’

  ‘We’re in the realm of your hypotheses, Marco. This whole thing is sheer madness. I thought that I’d lost my mind, but now I’m starting to think that you’re the crazy one.’

  ‘Crazier than you? You’re the one travelling around the world in search of imaginary girls.’

  ‘Okay,’ Alex admitted, doing his best to rein in his agitation. ‘Point taken. Go on.’

  ‘You and Jenny are talking to each other from two parallel dimensions.’

  Alex ran a hand through his hair, pulling back his blond fringe. A dog appeared from behind a tree and ran straight at him without barking. When the dog was almost at his feet, it looked up, cocked its head to one side, and gazed at him with a pair of eyes that made his heart melt, almost begging Alex to pat it. A few metres away, Alex saw a huge bodybuilder, easily two metres tall, dressed in a skimpy jogging outfit, grabbing the puppy’s leash and pulling it towards him, as if annoyed.

  ‘Marco, do you realise what you’re saying? What about me? Who am I in Jenny’s dimension? Or, perhaps I should say, do I exist there?’

  ‘You ought to exist, yes, though we can’t take that for granted.’

  ‘Then in my dimension, she exists! Her, or another version of her.’

  ‘In your dimension, Jenny’s life probably followed some other path. And the same thing is true for you in her world. She expected to meet you on that pier, but in her reality you’re probably back in Milan and have no idea who she is. Still, both in your dimension and in hers, many things have stayed the same. Evidently, Melbourne has the same mayor in both dimensions, and the layout of Altona Pier hasn’t changed much. That’s why the information seemed to match and you trusted her.’

  Alex looked around. The pier, the beach, the ocean. Was it really possible that somewhere out there was another world with a pier, a beach, and an ocean just like the ones before his eyes? With one tiny difference: that world had the Jenny he’d been talking to.

  Alex took a deep breath and filled his lungs with salt air. It was up to him to decide what to do next: believe in his friend’s theory and go on looking for Jenny; or give up entirely and go back to Milan and his safe, uneventful life as a student.

  He had no doubt about his decision.

  He still believed that Jenny was real, and he was going to do everything he could to find her.

  She, on the other hand, never wanted to hear his voice again.

  13

  I should try to find her … Alex started walking at a frenzied pace. If Marco’s right, and if Jenny’s life in this dimension isn’t all that different, then in this reality she probably lives in the same house.

  His thoughts kept getting tangled up and refused to leave him alone.

  He was on the other side of the world, all by himself. No one had showed up to meet him, but he refused to stop believing in her. Jenny was already a part of his past: she’d been there in his childhood.

  Unless that memory is a hallucination, too, thought Alex as he stopped to tie his shoelaces on the low wall that separated the footpath from the beach.

  No, that couldn’t be. Jenny had to exist; he would search for her everywhere in this city, and with even greater determination. He’d worry about a place to sleep later.

  As he walked up the Esplanade, he began randomly stopping people on the street, asking everyone he met if they could tell him anything about the Graver family. He couldn’t think of any better plan and, deep down, he believed that if he went on asking every passer-by he encountered until sunset, basic statistics suggested that he’d be sure to find at least some information.

  First, he spoke to a man running an ice-cream van. He wasn’t able to find out anything about Jenny, but he was forced to buy an ice-cream before he could get even a useful, not to mention understandable, answer out of the man.

  ‘Thanks a lot …’ he muttered under his breath as he walked away, with a half-melted ice-cream still in his hand.

  A few minutes later he cr
ossed paths with a woman out walking her dachshund, and he stopped her. He tried asking her a few questions, but the woman’s broad Australian accent made it impossible for Alex to understand a word she said. After a few clumsy attempts to communicate through gestures, he gave up and continued along the Esplanade.

  A trio of girls around the same age as him seemed to be making fun of him in their own slang; a man in a suit and tie dismissed him rudely; a couple in their early thirties thought they knew who Alex was talking about, but then realised that he’d said ‘Graver’, not ‘Braver’; last of all, a woman kept following him, trying to give him a pamphlet about a certain Church of Jesus. She didn’t know anything about Jenny’s family, but to make up for it she was willing to spend plenty of time spreading the word of Christ and inviting Alex to services at her parish.

  Around five that afternoon, he sank down on a bench, exhausted.

  Jenny … where are you?

  Immediately after asking that question, he felt a shiver go through him, clamping his eyes shut and taking him into a deeper dimension of his mind. His thoughts floated in silence, untethered from his surroundings.

  Can you hear me? thought Alex. This time his words echoed in the void.

  Silence.

  Jenny, where are you? Can you hear me?

  Total silence. Suddenly, a shout.

  Alex opened his eyes wide in horror. That was her. Sitting at her desk, with her head resting against the palm of her hand, her books spread open before her eyes and the highlighter clenched in her teeth, Jenny had heard Alex’s thoughts loud and clear. But she had rejected them.

  She’d concentrated and made an effort to think nothing at all. It had been incredibly hard. After a few minutes, she hadn’t been able to keep it up. She’d shouted ‘That’s enough’ and then she’d run into the bathroom, stripped off her clothes, and climbed under a boiling-hot shower, doing her best to focus on nothing but the sound of the spray on her scalp.

  Alex lurched back in panic. The shout echoed for a few more seconds inside his skull as he jerked to his feet. Then the telepathic contact faded.

  ‘What the hell …’ he cried out loud, looking around him. ‘What’s happening? Why would she do that?’

  Alex moved slowly away from the bench. His legs were aching, and the effort it had taken to establish contact with Jenny had left him weakened. He headed for the main shopping strip, slipping into one of the cross streets that ran through Altona, leaving the ocean behind him.

  I travelled around the world for you, Jenny … I won’t stop till I find you.

  ‘This should be it,’ Alex said as he looked at a hotel sign glowing at the end of the street.

  The sign said St James, followed by three stars. As he walked up, the automatic doors swung open and he entered the lobby. In front of him, a German couple was doing their best to make themselves understood by the man behind the reception desk. They seemed to be upset. Off to the right, in the distance, he spotted a television set and went over to it. There were a number of sofas and armchairs arranged in a semicircle around a Samsung plasma TV. Alex sat down, glad to be free of the backpack’s weight. The evening news was on.

  All of us in great danger … You important.

  The words of the Malaysian fortune teller suddenly surged back into his mind, and it was as though the man was sitting beside him, with his enigmatic smile and the cards in his hands.

  Alex’s head jerked around, as if to check that everything was all right. As if afraid that the man might be right behind him, following him like a silent shadow. He looked at his right hand. It was shaking.

  When he turned around again, he saw that the German couple had just left the reception desk and were walking towards the door. It was his turn now.

  ‘Stay calm, Alex, stay calm,’ he repeated to himself in a low voice before going up to the counter and asking if there was a single room available. Perhaps because he was so young, or because he was a foreigner, the man looked at him suspiciously. He asked to see his ID and a credit card. After taking down his details, he handed him a magnetic key-card and pointed him to the elevators.

  Jenny shut her book at a quarter past seven.

  Her parents had just come home. Clara was setting the table, and Roger was in the bathroom. Jenny emerged from her bedroom, still a little dazed after poring over logarithms for hours, and went downstairs. She stopped for a second in front of a small picture frame that hung on the wall, halfway down the stairs. It was a photograph of her grandparents. They were laughing heartily, arm in arm. Her grandfather had his hand on her grandmother’s. It was a wonderful picture and she adored it. She preferred confiding her innermost thoughts to them in front of that framed photograph, rather than kneeling on the gravel at St Kilda Cemetery.

  ‘Darling, would you come give me a hand? Dinner’s almost ready,’ called Clara from the kitchen.

  ‘Give me ten minutes,’ Jenny answered as she paced back and forth in the living room and then flopped down onto the sofa. She felt exhausted and would have given anything to be able to eat right there, on the couch, comfortably seated with her plate balanced on her knees.

  ‘In ten minutes I’ll be finished doing it myself. Couldn’t you come now?’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m coming.’

  Jenny stretched out her arms to motivate herself and rose from the sofa, but her arms felt heavy and dull. She needed to get some sleep, even just five minutes of sleep. Her eyelids felt as heavy as boulders. In the space of an instant, everything went black. When she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t say whether she had slept, or for how long.

  She got to her feet, ready to be told off by her mother. She leaned over to look inside the kitchen and saw that it was empty. Could her mother have possibly let her sleep without calling her for dinner?

  She started walking slowly towards the kitchen, but a painting on the living-room wall, right next to the sofa, caught her eye. It depicted a man in a jacket and tie, sitting in a black leather armchair. The expression on his face conveyed self-confidence, his gaze was intense, and his hair was neatly combed. Her mother must have just bought it.

  ‘Who on earth is this?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Mum, where are you?’

  A noise at the front door tore her eyes away from that portrait, which she had no memory of ever seeing. A few seconds later, the door swung open and her mother came into the house.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Clara as she set down three large bags of groceries.

  ‘But … Mum?’ Jenny stared at her. Her mother had a different hairdo. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘How would I know? Were you asleep? I just got home. Is everything all right?’

  ‘But, dinner … you were …’ Jenny stammered in confusion. ‘When did you hang up that thing? It’s hideous.’ Jenny indicated the painting with a toss of her head.

  ‘Connor’s portrait? If he hears you … What kind of crazy questions are you asking today? We hung it there last Christmas. You helped me yourself. Tell me, you haven’t been drinking by any chance, have you?’

  Jenny looked around without answering, because other details had caught her attention in the meantime. A lamp that was two metres tall, a white piece of furniture that took up the entire wall facing the front door, as well as a Persian carpet and a black office fax machine, which had replaced her beloved purple cordless phone. Everything had changed in the time she’d been asleep on the couch. It just doesn’t make any sense.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  Clara put her bag down on the sofa and walked towards her daughter. She caressed her face, then laid both hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Darling, what on earth’s come over you?’

  ‘Nothing’s come over me,’ said Jenny, who was starting to feel deeply uncomfortable. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  Clara lifted a hand to her mouth, as
if to conceal a sudden burst of emotion. ‘Your dad’s no longer with us. You know that, my darling.’

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Oh Jenny, why do you do this to me? It’s not any easier for me than it is for you, believe me. But it’s something we have to accept. Every so often I find myself unable to believe it. Sometimes, I see him everywhere too.’

  Jenny sat motionless for a few seconds, almost immobilised by her mother’s embrace. A knot sat in her throat. Then she suddenly broke free, turned her back on Clara, and ran for the stairs. She took them two steps at a time, heading for her bedroom. She ran in, slamming the door behind her. Just as she was about to throw herself facedown on her bed in despair, she saw it: a framed photograph of Roger, on the highest level of a podium after coming in first at a swimming meet. Beneath him, in red, was written: I miss you every day, Dad. Jenny.

  When she opened her eyes, she was still on the couch.

  ‘Well, do you want to come to dinner or not?’ Clara was shouting from the kitchen.

  Jenny leaped to her feet, panting. She looked around. My purple cordless … The images from the dream crowded her mind, like so many photographs tossed onto a table.

  Jenny got up and looked around for the portrait of that mysterious man in a suit and tie. It wasn’t there. In its place, where it always had been, was the poster of A Beautiful Mind, one of her family’s favourite movies. She went into the kitchen.

  ‘Daddy!’ Jenny exclaimed when she saw Roger at his usual place at the head of the table. She ran to him and wrapped her arms around him, planting a kiss on his cheek.

  ‘Hey, what’s up? You need to borrow some money?’ her father joked.

  ‘I had the most horrible nightmare,’ she replied, her eyes downcast and pensive. ‘You were …’

  ‘What was I, Jenny?’ he asked, apparently amused by his daughter’s odd behaviour.

  ‘Nothing, nothing. It was just a dream.’

  But it seemed so real … she thought to herself.

  Alex emerged from the shower, lay down on the bed, and turned on the TV. It was the first time he’d ever had a hotel room all to himself, and he felt as if he were the king of the world.