“But if you’d let me explain what I’m thinking.”
“Does your wife hate you because you’re a meddler?” I ask. “Is that it?”
Ralph tosses a fruit in the bucket and stands up with a hand on his lower back. “No.” He laughs. “ ‘Hate’ is probably the wrong word. I know I used it myself. Bev is disdainful. She looks down her nose at me. Which is worse than being hated. Hate at least implies an intensity of feeling. I am not important enough to my wife for her to hate me. I doubt that I ever have been, not even early on.”
“Sounds wretched,” I say.
“It could be at times. But when you love someone like I love her, you can go for years like that. We made it more than forty ourselves. Imagine.” He looks around the canyon. “Bev came from a family with money, and she grew up doing the things that monied people do. I tend to be a lot simpler than that. Boring. I would work and come home and read the evening paper, back when there still was such a thing, and have a couple glasses of whatever and maybe a couple glasses more. Listen to the game. Fish on the weekends. Bought a cabin on the lake and thought she would like that, wrong again. She couldn’t abide by the quiet. Complained the smell of campfire wouldn’t wash out of her clothes.”
“She sounds like a bitch, frankly.”
“She’s not,” he says. “Not really. She tried, early on. The first few years she went ice fishing at least as many times as I went to the symphony. There are pictures of us on a snowmobile, of her pulling pickerel out through a hole in the ice with her bare hands. She’s smiling. She looks happy, in those pictures. But at some point—after Newt was born, I think—she realized that was all there would ever be. And she couldn’t picture herself riding the back of a snowmobile every weekend for the rest of her life. Who could blame her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Eh.” He waves a hand. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad. We were a mismatch. She should have married someone who was comfortable in a tie, who could debate the merits of Russian versus Iranian caviar. That wasn’t me. But I loved her. And she felt affection for me, I know, at least for a while after we got married. But we never looked like the two of you do. Not once. Not even in those early years.”
He pauses for a minute, lets this sink in.
“Plus—and I’ll be honest with you—what really spurred me to talk to you this morning was the look I kept seeing on his face last night.”
“What do you mean?”
Ralph sets his face in a sort of come now expression. “I think you know.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Let’s just say when he looks at you he reminds me of myself.” He lifts the bucket of fruit from the dirt. “Listen, I’m going to run these up to camp and get them cleaned. Maybe you should take your time coming back. Enjoy all this beauty you’re so attached to. Just watch out for rattlesnakes.”
Before I have a chance to say anything else he’s turned and gone, moving briskly back up the gravel incline toward the ranch. I’m alone, and he had to mention the fucking snakes, didn’t he, because just like that the certainty that they’re lurking everywhere returns, and I have no desire to hang around and enjoy the spectacle of early morning in the desert, to take a leisurely walk through the waking canyon. None whatsoever. What I want is to be back at the ranch, warm inside the sleeping bag with Junior’s arm slung over my waist, his hand softly cupping my breast as he sleeps. I do not want to be alone in all this beauty. But I am, suddenly, too frightened to move.
I don’t understand this sudden paralysis. There’ve certainly been other, more tangible dangers before that never scared me this much: the varied and numerous acts of insanity committed by members of my family; the serial Peeping Tom my junior year at Stanford who stalked the dorms watching girls take showers; and of course more recently, the evening when I nearly died at the hands of a crazed government agent in an abandoned farmhouse somewhere in Massachusetts. Somehow the theoretical snakes, theoretically lurking everywhere on this most beautiful of mornings, trump them all.
But what does being an adult teach you, daily, if not how to function in the face of fear? Move your feet, I tell myself, and I manage one slow step, then another. I scan all around for snakes, and somehow seeing none makes it worse. I keep moving, concentrate only on that, and going up the hill is slow but somehow I reach the corral fence, and I step through the gap and find Junior still asleep inside the ranch. I kneel on the floor next to him and put a hand on his forehead, smooth his hair back. He wakes slowly. He must have been dreaming because it takes him a minute to realize where he is, but when he finally does he looks up and recognizes me and it’s then that I see the look Ralph was talking about. How is it possible that I never noticed it before? And he was right, there is a young Ralph in that look, too, adoring his new wife even as the seeds of her disdain for him are taking root.
I lean close and whisper in Junior’s ear. “Ralph wasn’t telling us the truth about his wife,” I say. “About why she hates him.”
Junior clears the sleep from his throat. “I know,” he says. His lips brush my earlobe.
“Of course you do. But do you know what I’m going to say next?”
“No.”
“Good.”
A pause. “Well?”
“I think we should cut our vacation short,” I say. “Drive to Phoenix, drop off the rental, and fly back to Chicago. So I can go sign up at the Emigration Registry.”
There is a long moment’s pause, and then he reaches up and pulls me close to him and I can actually feel his gratitude as a physical thing, and I know then that I have finally, finally stopped failing with people.
After that we’re like kids at Christmas. Junior gets up and we hurriedly pack a few things, leaving most of our supplies behind for Ralph. He watches us for a while, smiling, then goes outside to build the fire up again and cook breakfast. He implores us to sit and eat but we are too excited. I see a hint of sadness in his eyes and I realize how lonely he must have been before we came. Junior shakes Ralph’s hand. I hug him goodbye and he says “Thank you,” and I know exactly what he means. Then we put on our bags and walk. At the point where Ralph is about to disappear forever we turn and wave, and he waves back, a tiny figure down in the dust of the canyon below, alone in all that beauty. The hike out doesn’t take nearly as long as it seemed to coming in, and the car is right where we left it. Junior drives and I read the atlas and give directions. Soon we’re in Phoenix, and then we’re on a plane, asleep with our heads pressed together over the armrest. On the ground in Chicago we take a cab in from Midway. Rodney is there when we arrive. He’s surprised and, of course, happy to see us. Junior hugs him tight, almost violently, and ruffles his hair, playing the part of big brother as usual even though he’s the baby, and the two of them stand there looking at me with their arms around each other’s shoulders, out of breath, their hair mussed, grinning ear-to-ear.
Rodney’s chef Alice makes this incredible dinner—hanger steak with bordelaise, bok choy and roasted red potatoes—and we eat and talk with Dave Brubeck jazzing in the background. Junior drinks only two beers and they’re like an afterthought. The next morning I wake up very early and shower and get dressed, and as I move around the room, Junior watches me from the bed. He’s smiling at me in the half-light. When I’m finished putting myself together I lean over him and kiss his forehead, his lips.
He moves to throw the covers off and get up. “Wait a few minutes,” he says, “and I’ll go down with you.”
I push him back against the pillow. “Just sleep in,” I say. “I’ll only be a couple hours. When I get back we can walk down to the Biscuit Basket for an early lunch.”
He’s asleep again before I leave the bedroom. I step out and make sure the door’s locked behind me and go down to North State and pick up the red line. I ride downtown. At Grand I get off and cross the street to the Emigration Registry. Unsmiling soldiers in riot gear frisk me and check the contents of my purse. When I clear securi
ty I step inside and find, to my surprise, a fairly long line. So I queue up.
Directly in front of me is a woman with a baby held against her shoulder. It’s staring at me google-eyed, as babies do. I make what I imagine is a funny face.
Outside there’s a sudden commotion: shouting, followed by the sound of automatic gunfire. The line inside the registry fractures as people duck down and search frantically for cover, clutching at each other in groups of two and three. A man dressed head-to-toe in black runs through the entrance, setting off the metal detector. He’s hollering unintelligibly, and something bulky and ominous-looking is strapped to his chest.
I don’t have time to be scared. Out of nowhere there’s a pop and a dazzling flash, as though someone has taken my picture with the world’s largest camera, and I am lifted and thrown by what feels like a giant hand. There’s an instant of heat and terrible pain, and I can hear people screaming, but the sound recedes quickly and then there is something else altogether, and it’s not bad like everyone thinks it’ll be when they’re alive. It’s neither bad nor good. It’s nothing. And I will miss you, Mom and Dad and yes Oscar and my friends, especially Andrea, and of course Junior, sweetheart, poor, poor thing, I will miss you the most and I wish to God there were some way you could not be sad. I wish I could tell you there’s nothing sad at all in death, but I can’t. I can’t. Because I’m nothing.
PART THREE
The Multiverse, and Everything in It
As you sit here now in the waning moments of your existence, alone at the summit of Maine’s tallest mountain, waiting along with billions of others for the Destroyer of Worlds, we suppose it’s as good a time as any for us to reveal to you the true nature of everything. Then you will be given the reward you were promised years ago, which is really a choice, but it is a choice you will have to make quickly, because within a few hours the skies will turn from blue to red and the Earth will become like a giant broiler oven and everything even remotely combustible will burst spontaneously into flames, you included, and no further choices will be available to you. So, forthwith:
As you have suspected in the past, everything exists in a multidomain universe, or multiverse. Which to put it very, very simply means that an infinite number of variations on this world exist concurrently, complete with an infinite number of variations on you. Right now, for example, at a distance of 26344m from where you sit, there is another you, only it is the you of five seconds ago, staring at the sky and waiting for it to burn. 12597m away from that you is yet another, only this you has been turned to blowing ash by heat so intense even your bones are incinerated. Another you is fast asleep on board an Emigration transport bound for Gliese 689 d; another, younger you is vomiting on a Chicago sidewalk early on a Tuesday afternoon; still another is locked in the bathroom of your childhood home, masturbating to the mental image of Mrs. Harris. And so on, literally ad infinitum.
So your reward is a simple choice, one that has never been granted to anybody else, ever. Despite all you’ve endured, we hope you’ll agree that to be offered this opportunity—one that no one else has enjoyed in all of infinity—makes everything that you’ve suffered to this point worthwhile, in retrospect.
What we’re offering—which you’ve probably already guessed at, but we’ll articulate it anyway—is simply this: pick a self. Any self. We’re allowing you to choose, and then become, any you that you want. It can be a you that you’ve already been, any you along the timeline of the life already lived. You can start over as a zygote, if you like. Or you can be any of the endless possible yous that never happened, though of course given the nature of the multiverse they really did happen, and continue to happen and will happen again. An example: You could choose to be the you that would have resulted if you hadn’t stepped on that bumblebee with your bare foot in your aunt’s backyard when you were four. You would be reasonable to think that stepping on a bumblebee wouldn’t make much of a difference in the trajectory of a person’s life. And you would be wrong. Because if you hadn’t stepped on the bee it would have lived and gone on to begin pollination of the field behind the abandoned fire station on the north end of town, transforming this field from nothing but dull straw grass to a bright pastiche of oxeye daisies and heather, and Harry Boyd, an elderly millionaire who’d made his fortune with a regional chain of shoe stores and had become, in retirement, the greatest philanthropist the state of Maine had ever seen, would have been so struck by the beauty of these wild-flowers that the recreation center for poor children he’d been planning to build in a community twenty miles south would instead go up where that abandoned firehouse stood, changing the lives of thousands of kids in myriad ways over the ensuing years. The changed life most relevant to our discussion would be that of one Marc Lavway. Instead of following in the footsteps of his several older brothers, all of whom had hit the streets as bullies and delinquents at young ages and had graduated by now to actual criminal activity of varying seriousness, Marc would spend just about every moment outside school at the recreation center, playing basketball and floor hockey and even taking a couple of classes, learning to make pottery and speak a bit of Canadian French. And because Boyd would have endowed the recreation center with money for an annual college scholarship to be awarded to the center’s best all-around citizen, Marc Lavway would be given an opportunity that none of his older brothers, two of whom were by now into long stretches at the state prison, could have dreamed of. At college, freed from the awful home that he’d spent so much time at the recreation center to avoid, Marc would truly excel, earning his own way with an avalanche of merit-based scholarships and grants. Next would come medical school, following which Marc would complete his internship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston. And though with his talent and chosen specialty in emergency medicine he could probably have done more net good at an urban trauma center, Marc would elect instead to return home, working in the quiet emergency room at Inland Hospital, where he would spend his days handing out antibiotics and treating old ladies for shortness of breath. Eventually he would treat your father, who would arrive at the ER on Friday, December 6, 2002, with his biannual bout of pneumonia, exacerbated of course by heavy cigarette smoking. Lavway would perform the standard examination, make the obvious diagnosis, and prepare to write a script for erythromycin and send your father on his way. But then, for reasons unclear even to him, Lavway would on a hunch order a CT scan. Your father would question the expense, but Lavway would tell him that emergency physicians learn to rely on their instincts more so than other doctors, and in this case his instincts were screaming for him to get a CT scan of your father’s chest. Your father, liking what he perceived as Lavway’s straightforward, honest approach, would acquiesce, and in this manner his cancer would be discovered four years sooner, and it would be cured simply by removing the affected lung. Though neither Lavway nor your father would have any way of knowing this, Lavway’s instincts would have saved your father’s life, not by curing him of cancer (which of course you would have taken care of), but by altering the timeline going forward so that your father would be in an easy chair, rather than behind the wheel of his Mustang, when he passed out on the night of March 28, 2006.
And of course all of this did actually happen, 8518m from here, where a version of you saw the bumblebee just before his foot came down and spared himself a painful sting.
We realize this is a lot to absorb all at once, especially when you’ve already resigned yourself to dying here. We understand your frustration and sadness at having lost what little you loved, despite a lifetime spent trying to save it. We understand your skepticism regarding the chances that another go-round would result in anything other than more of the heartache and despair you’re now enduring. So we’ll give you some time, here. Just keep in mind, as you ponder, that there’s not a whole lot of time left one way or the other.
One other thing, and we promise after this we really will leave you alone for a bit: Please don’t allow your sorrow to blind you to
the scope of possibilities on offer. You know as well as we do that with infinite choices comes the potential for infinite happiness. If we may be allowed to speak frankly, for the fourth-smartest person in the history of the world you can be quite stupid at times. In fact it seems true, at least in this case, that great intellectual capacity can sometimes be a handicap, because we’re pretty certain that someone of average intelligence would have this one figured out fairly quickly, would in fact probably already have made a choice and be well on their way to (re)living a happy life.
So, yes, there is a correct choice here, is what we’re saying.
Seriously, just think about it. We’ll wait.
A hint: It didn’t have to turn out this way. Despite what you may think it was not our intention to set you up for heartache. Whether you believe it or not, whether you intended it or not, you at least indirectly chose the death of all that you love. Now we’re giving you the chance to choose again.
Interesting. Not what we expected, certainly, but it just might work. Of course you understand that this is just the beginning—whether or not you enjoy a happier life this time around depends entirely on what you do from this moment on. Nothing is guaranteed. You understand also that the choice, once made, cannot be reversed. You can’t decide later that you’d rather be the you who made his fortune counting cards at blackjack tables in Vegas, Atlantic City, and Monaco, living a life of sexual and material indulgence that would have made Don Juan blanch.
Of course that’s hardly your style. Still, we figured we’d at least give you the option, before it is too late. We mean, honestly: yachts in St.-Tropez? suites at the Hôtel de Paris? thousands of women, a new one every night, moths to the flame of burning money, each of whom has an exotically alluring way of pronouncing your name?