The Map of Chaos

  The familiar harmless background noise no longer echoed in his head. Instead, he was plagued by a constant stream of painfully clear images, of violent sensations he could no longer regard as occasional hallucinations. He would suddenly be invaded by a voracious hunger, an insatiable thirst, or the opposite: a fullness that would make him drowsy, or in the worst case he would vomit uncontrollably. For no reason, an animal fear would grip his insides, or he would be crushed by a terrible, savage loneliness. Faces would sometimes appear out of nowhere and lean over him, smiling grotesquely, or he would feel a humiliating wetness between his buttocks, or be overwhelmed by deep sleep, inconsolable crying, or paroxysms of laughter, which would end up infecting Jane . . . Wells was powerless to stop himself, at any moment, from feeling and seeing everything a baby felt and saw from his cradle, or from his mother’s arms, magnified and repeated ad infinitum. It was as if he had suddenly been locked in a room filled with bats wheeling round and screeching as they tried to escape. This was nothing like the unsettling sense of fragmentation the two of them had experienced when they first landed in this world, or the pleasant, pink dreams of the previous months . . . This was the insanity of looking at oneself in a hall of a thousand mirrors, if you will forgive the oblique reference, dear reader.

  Fortunately, their late lamented friend Dodgson, as a timely precaution they only discovered a month after his death, had named them sole heirs to the copyright of all his works “as a just reward for the inspired ideas they gave me during all those unforgettable golden afternoons.” Charles’s reasons for doing this just before he set sail for Europe gave them much food for thought, but regardless of his intentions, the money allowed the Wellses to endure their terrible ordeal safe in the knowledge that they were relatively financially secure. Reduced to a gibbering, incapable, whining wreck, Wells had to give up the teaching post he had secured at an academy in Bromley, the town of his birth, and place himself in the hands of his wife, and it was Dodgson’s bequest that enabled them to keep paying the rent on the cottage they had taken in the nearby village of Sevenoaks. During this period, Jane was everything to Wells: mother, friend, and wife to her husband, and the hand he clung to desperately as he dangled by a thread over the abyss. And they both realized how lucky they were that Jane was six years younger than he and so would not have to suffer that torment until sometime in the future. And thanks to this fortunate circumstance, when it did happen, it was Wells’s hand that held tightly to hers, preventing her from plummeting into the abyss he knew so well. Neither liked to think what would have become of them if they had been forced to go through that hell at the same time.

  But even though they knew they had their economic needs covered, and could count on each other, to begin with they thought they would not be able to bear it, that this really was the end, a fitting punishment for having broken the rules of the game. Did they really believe they could challenge the established order without suffering the consequences? They had fled the square the Creator had placed them on before he rolled the dice. And now they were paying the price. That gift for observation, which had made the universe they came from into a unique, indivisible, unambiguous place, a temple of knowledge, was now their Achilles’ heel. Their observational skills didn’t seem to work in the same way in their new theater, and instead of condensing all the possible realities into one, it enabled them to see each and every one of the infinite stages through the eyes of all their twins, with whom they appeared to be closely connected. All of a sudden, whether they wanted to or not, they were all-knowing and all-seeing. And that seemed to them like a fate worse than the one suffered by their own dying universe. A fate from which there was no escape this time.

  At first, the brutal onslaught of images and sensations that plagued them daily left them in pain and bewildered, with no time to reflect on what was happening to them or to elaborate any kind of response. Once again, they had to resort to laudanum in order to sleep, and the days turned into a long succession of indescribable torments. It was like living inside an iron maiden, feeling the sharp spikes piercing their bodies without touching any vital organs. I can’t bear it any longer! Chop off my head! they would cry out to each other. And yet, gradually, as they had done with the sensation of randomness, they managed to contain the deluge of multiple perceptions that threatened to overwhelm them. How? You may ask, dear reader. Well, that is not easy to explain without resorting to metaphors: Imagine that an immense cosmos lives inside every skull, a cosmos largely uncharted, and that Wells and Jane were able to create a magic hole in their consciousness, a kind of conduit through which they transmitted that vast amount of information to the farthest reaches of their minds. Naturally, that information bubbled ceaselessly inside their brains, like an infinite cluster of meteorites hurtling toward a vortex of darkness; but, depending on the day, they were more or less able to habituate themselves to it. And so, ten years later, both were able to state categorically that they had at last managed to control this gift, which they would never have known they possessed had they not left their own world.

  Not only did they become accustomed to it, they also succeeded in perfecting their technique. If they concentrated hard enough, they could momentarily close the magic hole pulsating at the center of their mind and capture one of the infinite worlds careering toward it. For a brief moment that world rescued at the last moment floated gently in their consciousness, blotting out all other perceptions. The Observer couple were thus able to spy on the lives of the twins in that world, as if through their own eyes, before the image dissolved. They realized immediately that, ironically, this curious game brought them relief from the intense concentration they had to maintain at all times, because while the hazy world they had ensnared bobbed placidly inside their heads, the deafening roar created by the other worlds subsided.

  Once they had discovered this, the couple started to spend the end of their almost invariably exhausting day sitting beside the fire, trying to connect with the mind of one of their twins. They would pour themselves a liqueur and, sipping it slowly, close their eyes. After a few moments’ concentration, voilà, they found themselves inside the head of another Wells or Jane, seeing his or her world through his or her eyes and ensconced in his or her most intimate thoughts. It was like setting anchor in someone else’s soul, except that this someone was him or her, or a possible version of him or her. After the spell had worn off, when the image of that world dissipated and they opened their eyes again, each would tell the other about the lives he or she had glimpsed, like making up stories round the fire, beautiful bedtime stories. And as each tried to captivate the other with the astonishing twists and turns in the story of their lives, they also revealed the secret universes their twins had hidden inside them, that private realm no one else can ever fully penetrate. And so, besides bringing them precious moments of calm, those stories allowed Wells and Jane to get to know each other in a way no couple ever had in any of the possible worlds.

  As you will doubtless appreciate, dear reader, for the first few years, when the majority of their twins were still very young, the stories they told each other were little more than amusing, childish anecdotes, like when Wells told Jane that one of his twins would steal his father’s cricket bat and use it to have swordfights with his brothers, or that most of them had decided to practice their handwriting by scrawling the word “butter” on the kitchen window. However, the timepieces on some of the stages were running slightly faster, and as many of Wells’s twins grew up, fell in love with one of their students (invariably the same frail young girl called Amy Catherine Robbins), and married her, their thoughts and innermost desires gave rise to absurd arguments between the Wellses. Observer Jane wasn’t pleased to discover that several of her husband’s twins had decided to win her over simply because they thought her liberal ideas and lack of inhibitions would make her a passionate bedfellow. Indeed, she was so upset by it that Wells had to remind her that he wasn’t responsible for his twins’ actions. Notwithstanding,
Jane had stopped talking to him for nearly two whole days, and she was aware of a delicious burning sensation in her guts, something every angry lover invariably felt, but which she was experiencing for the first time.

  It was while trying to describe those new emotions more precisely that the miracle occurred: without realizing it, they were taking the opposite path to the one they had been following in their world. Thus they ended up feeling the powerful emotions they were exposed to. They loved each other in infinite different ways, with infinite different results, only to discover that there was only one true way of loving: when two hearts beat as one. When that happened, nothing else mattered, Jane finally admitted, having discovered to her astonishment that many of her twins accepted that their respective husbands took lovers, provided the women they chose pleased them—in other words, that they posed no threat to their marriages. Her only request (which he fulfilled out of a respect for the truth?) was that he didn’t fall in love with them. Afterward, when Wells left them, in some of the universes she herself wrote them long letters of condolence.

  In the meantime, in this universe it was Observer Wells who had to take the blame for his dissolute twins.

  “But, my dear,” he had protested timidly, in an effort to stop his wife from decimating the rosebushes, “you must admit that intellectually speaking at least it was a brilliant idea. I’m not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it from a logical point of view, in a world dominated by passions, monogamy doesn’t reflect man’s natural state. In my humble opinion the approach a few of our twins have taken is highly intelligent. After all, provided there is no emotional attachment and both sides consent, what is the harm in an occasional extramarital affair?”

  “Would you like to put your theory into practice and verify it empirically, my dear?” Jane replied, spinning round with an icy smile as she brandished a pair of pruning shears, which seemed to Wells bigger and more pointed than usual.

  “Er . . . I already told you I don’t agree with that approach, my dear. I was simply analyzing the, er . . . the logic behind it.” Despite the dangerous proximity of the pruning shears, Wells couldn’t help ending his apology with a gibe: “But have no fear. I shall follow the example of those twins of mine who have decided to repress their instincts to promote through their wholesome example a system of virtue and integrity they have no belief in.”

  “I think that is the most intelligent approach you could possibly adopt, my dear, in my humble opinion” was Jane’s retort.

  But those quarrels were part of their new way of loving each other, and both of them discovered that their ensuing reconciliations, habitually enveloped in a pungent aroma of freshly cut roses, made them worthwhile.

  Their minor differences resolved, those were happy times again. Wells was delighted to learn that many of his twins had found success as authors, and moreover with the same books he had thrown on the fire in his universe. He was also very relieved to be able to share that old secret with Jane at last, though even more amazed to discover that she already knew. She had crept into his study one day with the aim of finding out why he shut himself away in there every evening and had been unable to resist reading them.

  “I thought they were so wonderful, Bertie, that I was mortified when you condemned them to the flames,” she confessed. “Why don’t you go back to writing stories like that? You could do it openly in this world.”

  “I don’t know, Jane . . .” He hesitated. “I used to be so . . . miserable. I didn’t realize it, but I was. And I suppose those stories were my way of escaping, a kind of liberation . . .” He took his wife’s hand and kissed it tenderly. “If you want the truth, I no longer feel any need to write.”

  “But we are what we imagine,” she said, remembering what the Dodgson from their world had once told her.

  “No, my dear,” corrected Wells, smiling suggestively. “We are what we love.”

  Jane smiled back at him, and for a few seconds they were content to make eyes at each other, the way they had only recently learned to do. Suddenly, Jane asked, “What if I were to write?”

  Wells looked at her, surprised.

  “You, write . . . ?” He hesitated, “Well, if that’s what you want . . . But why? And what about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. And I probably won’t even bother,” she replied with a nonchalant air. “I was only thinking aloud . . . Besides, if I did, I would keep it from you, the way you kept yours from me. I have been thinking, and I came to the conclusion that, knowing your twins’ ‘urges’ as well as I do, the only way I can keep you interested is by making sure you don’t know everything about me. I am afraid that if you did, you would get bored and start looking for other . . . mysteries.”

  “My dear . . . ,” Wells said, his voice choked with desire as he leaned toward his wife’s mouth, which parted sensually to receive his kiss, “I assure you that in none of the infinite worlds in which you exist could you be considered a boring woman.”

  Jane knew he meant it. Much to her relief, she had seen for herself that, in one way or another, all her twins had managed to escape the fate normally reserved for women in their adopted universes. They were without exception brilliant young women who had avoided humdrum existences by pursuing serious intellectual activities, or a wide array of artistic disciplines, and although that meant they were shunned by society, none of them seemed to care. Those infinite Janes enjoyed being part of their husbands’ cultural and political circles, not merely as companions, but as valued and admired colleagues. In fact, none of them fulfilled the roles expected of women in their respective worlds, and Observer Jane felt as proud of that as if she had instructed each of them herself.

  And yet it made her equally sad to observe that they all voiced the same complaint: their husbands didn’t love them enough. They all thought, as they pruned their rosebushes with a vengeance, filling their respective houses with reproaches that reeked of freshly cut roses, that their husbands would never understand them or realize how far they were from making their wives happy. But they were mistaken. All of them were mistaken. Observer Jane wished she could tell them everything she knew, about what her Wells had described to her in so much detail, about what all of their husbands felt deep inside, safe from prying eyes: how much they admired and respected their wives, how profound their love for them was, and the terrible impotence they experienced in not being able to show it. Perhaps Wells was incapable of grand romantic gestures in any of the infinite universes, but Observer Jane knew that somewhere deep down he possessed that ability, and it was only a matter of time before it burst forth in one of those worlds, before some Wells showed his Jane what he was capable of doing for love. Indeed, Observer Wells was a case in point: no doubt intimidated by a universe full of discontented Janes, he had developed an unexpectedly amorous nature that would have made Casanova himself turn green with envy. And if her Wells could do it . . . Although he wasn’t just any Wells, Jane reflected proudly, he was a unique Wells. Different from any other Wells. And he was hers.

  When his twin went off to London to study at the Normal School of Science, Wells decided it was time to resume his old plan and try to become part of the lives of that Wells and his future wife. Curiously, no matter how hard they concentrated, the minds of these two were the only ones Observer Wells and Observer Jane were unable to inhabit. Although that made some sense: the stage on which their twins were performing must have been a sort of observatory from which to contemplate the other stages in the theater, and perhaps that was why it was more difficult for them to observe it. As a result, the only way for them to discover more about their lives was through the traditional method of spying, watching from a distance their movements, which didn’t seem to differ much from those of their other twins. Thus far, nothing in that couple’s placid existence seemed to justify the urgent need that had driven Wells and Jane to move to Sevenoaks, although, now that Wells’s double had moved to the biggest city in the world, that might all change. With the aim of keep
ing as close an eye on his twin as possible, Observer Wells requested references from his former dean at Oxford and managed to obtain a teaching post at the Normal School of Science. It was the second time the Wellses had moved since they fell down a rabbit hole into Dodgson’s sitting room, in front of Alice’s startled little eyes, and they couldn’t help wondering whether that change might also herald the beginning of another Dark Era. Having found happiness again, having turned their lives into a prolongation of those golden afternoons by learning to love each other with utter devotion, neither wanted that to end. They did not believe fate could be so cruel.