Turning the handle, I drag it slowly open.
First sensation: the smell of evergreens.
Shafts of sunlight slant down through a forest of closely spaced pine trees.
In the near distance, a deer stands motionless, staring through its dark, wet eyes at the box.
When I step outside, the deer bounds off soundlessly through the pines.
The forest is startlingly quiet.
Mist hovers over the pine-needle floor.
I walk out a little ways from the box and sit on a piece of ground in direct morning sun that feels warm and bright against my face.
A breeze pushes through the tops of the trees.
I catch a hint of woodsmoke in the wind.
From an open fire?
A chimney?
I wonder, Who lives here?
What sort of a world is this?
I hear footsteps.
Glancing back, I see Amanda coming toward me through the trees and register a pang of guilt—I almost got her killed in that last world. She isn’t just here because of me. She’s here because she saved me. Because she did a brave, risky thing.
She sits beside me and turns her face to the sun.
“How’d you sleep?” she asks.
“Hard. Awful crick in my neck. You?”
“Sore all over.”
She leans in close and studies my ear.
“Bad?” I ask.
“No, the bullet just trimmed off part of your earlobe. I’ll clean it up for you.”
She hands me a liter of water we refilled in that futuristic Chicago, and I take a long sip that I wish would never end.
“You doing okay?” she asks.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. Lying dead on our porch. And Charlie up in his room. We are so lost.”
Amanda says, “I know it’s hard, but the question you should be thinking about—we should both be thinking about—is why did you bring us to that world?”
“All I wrote was, ‘I want to go home.’ ”
“Exactly. That’s what you wrote, but you carried baggage through the door.”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obviously not.”
“Your worst fear.”
“That type of scenario isn’t everyone’s?”
“Maybe. But it’s so perfectly yours I’m surprised you don’t see it.”
“How is it perfectly mine?”
“Not just losing your family, but losing them to illness. The same way you lost your mother when you were eight years old.”
I look over at Amanda.
“How’d you know that?”
“How do you think?”
Of course. She was Jason2’s therapist.
She says, “Watching his mother die was the defining event of his life. It played a critical part in why he never married, never had kids. Why he sunk himself into work.”
I believe it. There were moments, early on, when I considered running from Daniela. Not because I wasn’t crazy about her, but because on some level, I was afraid of losing her. And I felt the same fear all over again when I found out she was pregnant with Charlie.
“Why would I seek out a world like that?”
“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works.”
Passing the water back to her, I say, “Forty.”
“Forty what?”
“Forty ampoules left. Half are yours. That gives us each twenty chances to get this right. What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure. All I know at this point is that I’m not going back to my world.”
“So do you want to stay together, or is this goodbye?”
“I don’t know how you feel, but I think we still need each other. I think maybe I can help you get home.”
—
I lean back against the trunk of a pine tree, a notebook resting on my knees, my thoughts teeming.
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself.
My emotions.
My inner storm.
The secret engines that drive me.
If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?
I stare at the page and begin to write down every detail of my Chicago that comes to mind. I paint my life with words.
The sounds of the children in my neighborhood walking to school together, their voices like a stream flowing over rocks—high and burbling.
Graffiti on the faded white brick of a building three blocks from my house that was so artfully done it was never painted over.
I meditate on the intricacies of my home.
The fourth step on the staircase that always creaks.
The downstairs bathroom with the leaky faucet.
The way my kitchen smells as coffee brews first thing in the morning.
All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 32
There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being—a mannequin or humanlike robot—it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.
It’s a similar psychological effect as I walk the streets of this Chicago that’s almost mine. I would take an apocalyptic nightmare any day. Crumbled buildings and gray wasteland don’t hold a candle to standing on a corner I’ve passed a thousand times and realizing that the street names are wrong. Or the coffee place where I always stop to grab my morning triple-shot Americano with soy is a boutique wine shop instead. Or my house at 44 Eleanor Street is a brownstone inhabited by strangers.
—
This is the fourth Chicago we’ve connected to since escaping that world of sickness and death. Each has been like this one—almost home.
Night is imminent, and since we’ve taken four hits of the drug in fairly rapid succession with no recovery period, we decide for the first time not to return to the box.
It’s the same hotel in Logan Square where I stayed in Amanda’s world.
The neon sign is red instead of green but the name is the same—HOTEL ROYALE—and it’s just as quirky, just as frozen in time, but in a thousand insignificantly different ways.
Our room has two double beds, and just like the last room I had here, it looks out onto the street.
I set our plastic bags containing toiletries and thrift-store clothes on the dresser beside the television.
Any other time, I might have balked at this dated room that smells like cleaning product failing to cover up mildew and worse.
Tonight it feels like luxury.
Pulling off my hoodie and undershirt, I say, “I’m too gross to even have an opinion about this place.”
I toss them into the waste bin.
Amanda laughs. “You don’t want to get into a who’s-more-disgusting competition with me.”
“I’m surprised they rented us a room at any price.”
“That might tell you something about the quality of establishment we’re dealing with.”
I go to the window, part the curtains.
It’s early evening.
Raining.
The exterior hotel sign bleeds red neon light into the room.
I couldn’t begin to guess the day or date.
I say, “Bathroom’s all yours.”
Amanda grabs her things from the plastic bag.
Soon, I can hear the bright sound of running wat
er echoing off the tile.
She calls out, “Oh my God, you have to take a bath, Jason! You have no idea!”
I’m too dirty to lie down on the bed, so I sit on the carpet next to the radiator, letting waves of heat wash over me and watching the sky darken through the window.
—
I take Amanda’s advice and draw a bath.
Condensation runs down the walls.
The heat works wonders on my lower back, which has been out for days from sleeping in the box.
As I shave my beard, the questions of identity keep haunting me.
There’s no Jason Dessen employed as a physics professor at Lakemont College or any of the local schools, but I can’t help wondering if I’m out there somewhere.
In another city.
Another country.
Perhaps living under a different name, with a different woman, a different job.
If I am, if I spend my days under broken-down cars in a mechanic’s shop or drilling cavities instead of teaching physics to college students, am I still the same man at the most fundamental level?
And what is that level?
If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?
After an hour, I emerge, clean for the first time in days, wearing jeans, a plaid button-down, and an old pair of Timberlands. They’re a half size too big, but I’ve doubled up on wool socks to compensate.
Amanda studies me appraisingly, says, “Works.”
“Not so bad yourself.”
Her thrift-store score consists of black jeans, boots, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket that still reeks of the prior owner’s smoking habit.
She’s lying in bed, watching a TV show I don’t recognize.
She looks up at me. “Know what I’m thinking?”
“What?”
“Bottle of wine. Ridiculous amount of food. Every dessert on the menu. I mean, I haven’t been this skinny since college.”
“The multiverse diet.”
She laughs, and it’s a good thing to hear.
—
We walk for twenty minutes in the rain, because I want to see if one of my favorite restaurants exists in this world.
It does, and it’s like running into a friend in a foreign city.
This cozy, hipster place is a riff on an old Chicago neighborhood inn.
There’s a long wait for a table, so we stalk the bar until a pair of stools opens up, sliding in at the far end beside a rain-streaked window.
We order cocktails.
Then wine.
A thousand small plates that just keep coming.
We catch a hard, beautiful glow off the booze, and our conversation stays very much in the moment.
How the food is.
How good it feels to be inside and warm.
Neither of us mentions the box even once.
Amanda says I look like a lumberjack.
I tell her she looks like a biker chick.
We both laugh too hard, too loud, but we need it.
As she gets up to go to the bathroom, she says, “You’ll be right here?”
“I will not move from this spot.”
But she keeps looking back.
I watch her walk down the bar and disappear around the corner.
On my own, the ordinariness of the moment is almost too much to stand. I glance around the restaurant, taking in the faces of the waiters, the customers. Two dozen noisy conversations mixing into a kind of meaningless roar.
I think, What if you people knew what I knew?
—
The walk back is colder and wetter.
Near the hotel, I see the sign for my local bar, Village Tap, blinking across the street.
I say, “Feel like a nightcap?”
It’s late enough that the bulk of the evening crowd has thinned out.
We grab seats at the bar, and I watch as the bartender finishes updating someone’s ticket at the touchscreen.
He finally turns and comes over, looks at Amanda first, then me.
It’s Matt. He has probably served me a thousand drinks in my lifetime. He served me and Ryan Holder my last night in my world.
But there’s no hint of recognition.
Just blank, disinterested courtesy.
“What can I get you guys?”
Amanda orders a wine.
I ask for a beer.
As he pulls the tap, I lean over and whisper to Amanda, “I know the bartender. He doesn’t recognize me.”
“What do you mean you know him?”
“This is my local bar.”
“No. It’s not. And of course he doesn’t recognize you. What’d you expect?”
“It’s just weird. This place looks exactly like it should.”
Matt brings our drinks over.
“Want to start a tab?”
I have no credit card, no identification, nothing but a roll of cash in the inner pocket of my Members Only jacket right next to our remaining ampoules.
“I’ll just settle up now.” As I reach for the money, I say, “I’m Jason, by the way.”
“Matt.”
“I like this place. Yours?”
“Yep.”
He seems not to give a single fuck what I think of his bar, and it puts a sad, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Amanda senses. When Matt leaves us, she lifts her wineglass and clinks it against my pint.
Says, “To a good meal, a warm bed, and not being dead yet.”
—
Back in the hotel room, we kill the lights and get undressed in the dark. I know I’ve lost all objectivity with regard to our accommodations, because the bed feels wonderful.
Amanda asks from her side of the room, “You locked the door?”
“I did.”
I close my eyes. I can hear the rain ticking against the window. The occasional car moving past on the wet street below.
“It was a nice night,” Amanda says.
“It was. I don’t miss the box, but it’s strange being away from it.”
“I don’t know about you, but my old world is feeling more and more like a ghost. You know how a dream feels the farther you get from it? It loses its color and intensity and logic. Your emotional connection to it fades.”
I ask, “You think you’d ever forget it entirely? Your world?”
“I don’t know. I could see it getting to the point where it didn’t feel real anymore. Because it isn’t. The only thing that’s real in this moment is this city. This room. This bed. You and me.”
—
In the middle of the night, I realize Amanda is beside me.
It’s nothing totally new. We’ve slept like this in the box many times. Holding each other in darkness, as lost as two people have ever been.
The only difference now is that we’re wearing nothing but our underwear and her skin is distractingly soft against mine.
Shivers of neon light slip through the curtains.
Reaching over in the dark, she takes hold of my hand and puts it around her.
Then she turns over, faces me.
“You’re a better man than he ever was.”
“Who?”
“The Jason I knew.”
“I hope so. Jesus.” I smile to flag the joke. She just stares at me with these midnight eyes. We’ve looked at each other a lot lately, but there’s something different in the way she’s looking at me now.
There’s a connection here, and it’s getting stronger every day.
If I moved even an inch closer in her direction, we would do this.
No question in my mind.
And if I did kiss her, if we slept together, maybe I’d feel guilty and regret it, or maybe I’d realize that she could make me happy.
Some version of me certainly kissed her in this moment.
Some version knows the answer.
But it won’t be me.
She says, “If you want me to go back over there, just say i
t.”
I say, “I don’t want you to, but I need you to.”
AMPOULES REMAINING: 24
Yesterday, I saw myself on the Lakemont campus in a world where Daniela had died—according to an obituary I found online at the public library—at thirty-three from brain cancer.
Today, it’s a gorgeous afternoon in a Chicago where Jason Dessen died two years ago in a car accident.
I step into an art gallery in Bucktown, trying not to look at the woman behind the counter, whose nose is in a book. Instead, I focus on the walls, which are covered in oil paintings whose subject appears to be exclusively Lake Michigan.
In every season.
Every color.
Every time of day.
The woman says without looking up, “Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.”
“Are you the artist?”
She sets the book aside and steps out from behind the register.
Walks over.
It’s the closest I’ve been to Daniela since the night I helped her die. She’s stunning—form-fitting jeans and a black T-shirt splattered with acrylic paint.
“I am, yes. Daniela Vargas.”
She clearly doesn’t know me, doesn’t recognize me. I guess in this world, we never met.
“Jason Dessen.”
She offers her hand, and I take it. It feels just like hers—rough and strong and adept—the hand of an artist. Paint is stuck to her fingernails. I can still feel them running down my back.
“These are amazing,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“I love the focus on one subject.”
“I started painting the lake three years ago. It’s so different season to season.” She points to the one we’re standing in front of. “This was one of my first attempts. That’s from Juneway Beach in August. On clear days in late summer, the water turns this luminescent, greenish blue. Almost tropical.” She moves down the wall. “Then you get a day like this in October, all clouded over, and it paints the water gray. I love these because there’s almost no distinction between the water and the sky.”
“You have a favorite season?” I ask.
“Winter.”
“Really?”
“It’s the most diverse, and the sunrises are spectacular. When the lake froze over last year, those were some of my best paintings.”
“How do you work? En plein air, or—”
“From photographs mainly. I occasionally set up my easel on the shore in the summer, but I love my studio so much I rarely paint elsewhere.”