by Nino Cipri
“Couldn’t— Sorry, I—”
“It’s okay,” Ava said. “Shh, it’s alright, just try to breathe.”
Jules shook their head. Salt water was dripping out of their hair, down their face, into their tightly shut eyes. “I tried. I swam as far as I could, but I wasn’t—I couldn’t.”
They coughed out a sob. It was an awful sound, lonely and wretched. Ava squeezed her arm tighter around Jules, even though it made it harder to keep them afloat.
“It’s okay,” Ava said.
“We’re going to die out here and it’s my fault,” Jules wailed, their voice breaking in the middle under the salt water’s assault.
Ava shook her head. “It’s not.”
“It is! I always do this, I try and fix things and I make them even worse—”
“Listen to me!” she shouted. “This is not your fault. It’s Tricia’s for sending us. And corporate’s, they’re the ones that cut the FINNA teams in the first place.”
A moment of quiet. Jules’s breathing was beginning to even out. “I guess that’s true,” they said shakily.
“Capitalism,” said Ava.
Jules huffed a laugh. “Yep.”
They were both quiet for a moment. Now that she was no longer alone, Ava felt the panic ebbing out of her. It was an odd feeling. She’d lived with fear and anxiety for so long, and fell into fits of dread and despair over the smallest things. Going to work. Making a dentist appointment. Grocery shopping. The light right after the sun went down, when she realized she’d accomplished almost nothing that day. All normal things that normal people could deal with, and she was never equal to the challenge of them. Catastrophe seemed to lurk around every corner, and she felt constantly out of control.
Now Ava was literally at sea, in an alien universe, at the whim of her shitty retail job. She had no control. Her limbs were already drifting toward exhaustion. And she was calm.
“We should conserve our energy,” she said softly.
“Why?” Jules said brokenly. “What’s the point?”
There was no point, and they both knew it. So Ava ignored the question. “Here, float on your back,” she said, thinking of long-ago swim lessons. “Like this.”
She let Jules go and shifted in the water until she was horizontal, arms and legs akimbo. The salty water buoyed her, made her feel weightless.
“What if we float away from each other?” Jules asked.
Ava turned her hand over, holding it out to them.
So they floated like that, quietly holding hands. It felt too normal for the situation. Here they were in another universe, facing death by drowning and/or hypothermia—but the touch, the calmness, felt, in some ways, more normal than the last three days, since Jules had walked out of Ava’s apartment. More normal even than the month preceding it, after the shift in their relationship that Ava couldn’t articulate but that she felt in her bones; her body knew it had been the end, looming. And it had been sudden and inexplicable and, like all ends, utterly implacable. The more desperately Jules had tried to fix it, the more irreparable it seemed.
But that wasn’t quite it, was it? The more Jules had tried to fix things between them, the more broken Ava had felt. Breaking up with Jules felt like the only way she could salvage anything of herself.
Ava imagined what the two of them looked like from far above: two bright specks against the dark sea, dressed in the same sky-blue polos and khaki pants. She wondered if their bodies would ever be found; if there was life in this sea that would eat them, take nourishment from them.
“Do you think there’s a universe out there where we didn’t break up?” she asked Jules.
Jules was quiet a moment, then answered. “There are infinite universes.”
“So there are universes where we … worked. Where my brain wasn’t garbage.”
“And I didn’t run away from my problems.”
Ava thought she should argue, but she was too exhausted. “Where we stayed together, had a big gay wedding, adopted kids, and then died together. In our nineties, in the same bed.”
Jules snorted. They knew The Notebook had left an outsized impression on Ava’s preteen mind. “Sure,” they said. “And just as many universes where we never met at all. Or stayed together and were completely miserable.”
“Or broke up and managed to be friends.” There was salt in her mouth; seawater or tears, maybe both.
“Infinite iterations,” Jules said. Their voice was hardly more than a whisper, but Ava could hear everything Jules was feeling in those two words: grief, but also acceptance, and just a hint of the wonder that always animated Jules, an abiding surprise with the world. They had told her once that they’d never expected to live to be twenty-five, and they still had a hard time imagining that they’d live to be thirty. It had seemed like too much to ask for, as a Black, trans teenager of immigrant parents. Thirty years had felt like an unreasonable expectation. So every day is like a gift, Ava had said. It had been early in their relationship, and every night had stretched into cycles of sex and kissing and rambling postcoital conversation.
Existence isn’t a gift, it’s a right, Jules had replied. But having to reclaim it every day makes life easier to appreciate, maybe.
Ava squeezed Jules’s hand, wishing she had the energy to articulate her feelings. She’d wished that she could have felt a fraction of their appreciation for existence.
“Do you hear that?” Jules said.
“Hear what?” Ava asked, but she realized that she did: a soft pinging sound from the water, like an underwater bell. Ava counted six pings before a flurry of bubbles erupted all around her and Jules.
What now? she thought, sure the two of them were about to be eaten by a whale. The previously calm water churned, buffeting them with waves. Ava lost her grip on Jules’s hand and was briefly sucked under the water, only to realize that there was something sturdy underneath her hands and knees. It rose steadily up and out of the water: a giant, dark gray surface, pebbled enough that she could stand on it without slipping. As the enormous thing breached beneath her, Ava thought again of a whale, but it seemed too broad, a surface nearly the breadth of a city block, the shape of a baseball diamond. Maybe she was going to be eaten by a giant manta ray. How novel.
A few feet away, she saw Jules scramble after something. The FINNA, she realized, and she watched it bounce and roll toward the edge. Jules caught it just before it toppled off, back into the water.
“This is real, right?” Ava asked them. “I’m not hallucinating from hypothermia?”
“Maybe we both are,” Jules called back. They stood on shaky legs, making their way back so the two of them could stand together. “But also, we’re in a different universe, so who actually knows.”
Ava looked closer as the pebbled skin of whatever they were standing on and found rivets in it. “I think it’s a ship.”
“Then what’s that?” Jules asked. They raised a trembling finger, and Ava followed it. They were pointing at a mound in the center of the—the hull, Ava thought, the word coming to her from the brief two months when she had entertained fantasies about joining the navy, which she’d indulged by binging sailor movies.
A hatch atop the mound in the hull suddenly sprang open with a hiss of air. A figure climbed halfway out of it; an older woman in a high-collared coat, crimson with sky-blue piping.
“Ahoy!” Jules called to her. Then, to Ava: “That’s what people say on boats, right?”
Ava was looking closer at the woman who had just climbed out onto the hull. She yanked open the waterlogged purse she’d found in the deadly garden LitenVärld, miraculously still over her shoulder, and pulled out the pocketbook, flipping it open to look at the driver’s license.
“Ahoy yourselves!” Ursula Nouri called. Or at least, this universe’s approximation of her. “You seem like you could use a lift!”
CHAPTER SIX
Ava had never been on a submarine before. Her initial assessment: maybe she should look back into b
eing a naval seaman. The hallways were low-ceilinged but wide, with strips of light glowing blue and green and red, jewel-bright and cheerful. Brass dials and instruments littered most of surfaces, and layers of graffiti crowded any empty space. It was certainly better than the fluorescent lights and smooth jazz covers of pop songs that were hallmarks of working retail.
“Welcome aboard the L. V. Anahita, merchant class vessel,” the woman said. “I’m Captain Nouresh.”
She looked them over and they did the same. Captain Nouresh had a thick braid of white hair that hung down one shoulder, and wore black high-waisted pants and a white linen shirt underneath her coat. She looked stunningly similar to the old woman Ava had seen in the photo on the young woman’s phone, though her hair was longer, her face paler, and she had a few extra scars.
“You’re travelers then?” Nouresh asked. “Through the marejii?” At Ava’s blank stare, she amended, “Sorry, what do you call them? The hallways between worlds.”
“Maskhål,” Ava answered.
“Wormholes,” Jules corrected. “Our stupid boss at LitenVärld calls them maskhål, because they’re a Swedish corporation.”
Nouresh looked at them blankly. “I thought I could still speak your language, but maybe I was wrong.”
“Wait, how can you speak our language?” Ava said, wringing out her hair.
“I’m a traveler myself,” Nouresh said, bowing with an ironic flourish. “I spent my youth navigating the marejii. I stayed for some months in a city where they spoke your language. It was called Annapolis.”
Jules and Ava shared a look. “I have no idea where that is.”
“Minnesota?” Ava guessed.
“I think that’s Minneapolis.” Jules looked back at the captain. “Sorry, we haven’t traveled much.”
“No? It’s a beautiful city of bricks, at the crossroads of a river and the sea. I was happy there for a while.”
Jules and Ava said that it sounded very nice, wherever it was. (Maine? Maryland? They’d have to check the LitenVärld directory.) Then Ava gave a performative shiver and asked, “Is there a place we can get some dry clothes?”
“I’ll take you to the market,” Nouresh said. “Follow me.”
They followed the older woman through a series of halls, all of them similarly low-ceilinged, and lit with the same emerald lights that Jules eventually pointed out looked alive. “They are,” Nouresh said. “Tiny creatures that give off light.”
“Bioluminescent plankton!” Jules said. “That’s so cool!”
Nouresh seemed bemused by their outburst, and Ava explained, “They said the same thing about a chair that almost ate them.”
“Oh, the Soft Snare? In Universe 241?”
Captain Nouresh, it seemed, had compiled a taxonomy of the universes she had traveled to in her youth, in service to something called the Cooperative of Nations. She’d taken detailed descriptions, notes on languages, flora and fauna, dominant species and their social structures. Ava could see Jules’s eyes growing wide as she told them of the places and things that she had seen.
Wanderlust. Ava had never really had it. Jules always had. They’d always felt stuck, both at LitenVärld and in their hometown, where they had returned after dropping out of college. Ava was aware of this large portion of Jules’s life that they didn’t discuss—what had happened at their school, why they had dropped out, why they had come back home afterward—but never asked about it, even during that first, dizzying flush of falling in love. Ava had always skirted it; she’d thought that she was giving Jules room and space to bring it up on their own schedule, but they never had. And she’d assumed that now they never would, but maybe that could change.
“How many worlds did you come through?” Captain Nouresh asked.
“Three?” Ava said. “It’s hard to tell. I couldn’t spot all of the seams.”
“Not bad, for a first trip. What made you leave your world? And what are you using to navigate?”
Jules looked at Ava. “We were actually—”
“Using this old piece of shit,” Ava interrupted, pulling the FINNA out of Jules’s grasp. “Didn’t hold up to the water, though.”
Captain Nouresh cooed at the FINNA like it was a small, injured animal. “Oh, look at this. Haven’t seen one of these since I was your age.”
She pressed one of its buttons and it beeped at her, the sound warbly and sad. “Shouldn’t be too hard to fix. These things were designed to take a beating.”
Ava hadn’t realized how deeply she was afraid of not being able to get home until Nouresh said that. A tight knot of muscles loosened in the center of her back, and she was able to breathe.
“It’ll take me some time,” the captain said. “In the meantime, though, I’m sure you’ll be able to occupy yourself.”
She stuck the FINNA in the deep pocket of her coat, and wrenched open a door. The noise hit Ava first, a cheerful hubbub of voices, music, bodies, and business. She shared a quick look with Jules and felt a pulse of excitement pass between the two of them. She followed Jules through the hatch and into a wild, chaotic bazaar.
Vendors stood in front of a labyrinth of stalls. The ceiling here was higher, and tent walls stretched up toward it, rippling with movement as large, leaf-shaped fans circulated the air in the room.
The market—which stretched the resemblance to the LitenVärld she knew—didn’t take cash, only trade. Jules, veteran of many church basement rummage sales, found a table with piles of clothing to trade in their seawater-soaked uniform. They reappeared in what looked like sailor’s garb: a cotton shirt, loose pants, and a coat, though they had to give up the steel-toed sneakers they’d bought at Kmart in order to work in stocking and assembly. They seemed happier to be barefoot.
“Nice,” Ava said, catching sight of them after they haggled. “You fit right in.”
Ava ended up trading in the bottle of Ursula’s perfume along with her uniform for a tunic, skirt, and a warm knitted shawl. She felt guilty, but also figured that Ursula wouldn’t miss the bottle, and her granddaughter wouldn’t realize it was gone.
“Thanks,” Jules said. “You look … comfortable.”
“Wow,” Ava said drily. “Great.” She’d picked out clothing as close to pajamas as she could find, and probably didn’t look anywhere near as cool as Jules.
“In a good way!” Jules said, holding up their hands. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen you look anything besides …”
Ava could fill in the blank. Miserable. Angry. Depressed. Fair enough.
“Let’s get some food,” she said, and Jules nodded.
They followed their noses toward the center of the market, and found a plethora of food stalls. The food stalls, weirdly, shared names with the chains and franchises that Ava found herself eating at too often in their shitty suburb. The Olive Grove had mounds of freshly baked pita bread and hummus. Dumpling Express was half-obscured by clouds of fragrant steam, serving little bundles wrapped tightly in leaves. El Buckarito, the worst Tex-Mex chain to have ever given Ava food poisoning, offered skewers of grilled meat and vegetables, liberally coated with spices.
Jules tapped on Ava’s shoulder, and she turned to find them pointing at a sign that said Pasta and Friends, staffed by a single old man hand-rolling noodles.
“Think they take gift cards?” Jules asked.
“Who said I was going to share?” Ava asked. She relished Jules’s look of utter betrayal before handing them one.
The noodles were delicious, and Captain Nouresh graciously bought them a round of sweet, ginger-flavored wine to drink with their meal. Jules eventually got distracted by a group of kids kicking a ball around—they always said that soccer was a language that transcended all borders, and apparently that held true across the multiverse—and Captain Nouresh started tinkering with the waterlogged FINNA, pulling out a set of tools from a pouch on her belt.
“You should tell her,” Jules whispered, right before they went off with the kids. “Why we’re here.”
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Ava had actually managed to forget, for a while, that they were on a mission from their lords and masters at LitenVärld. She resented the reminder; it was nice to blame LitenVärld for making them face murderous clones and carnivorous chairs, but she didn’t want to credit her corporate overlords for sending her here, the first new world that actually seemed cool.
“Do you often get travelers like us?” Ava asked Captain Nouresh. “Coming through wormholes?”
The captain poked confidently and curiously through the guts of the FINNA as she spoke. She sketched out the world of the Anahita, one of a class of merchant ships that moved between underwater city-states, migratory nations that traversed the ocean’s surface, and the nomadic townships that hung at the edges of both.
“I wonder if our universe is some kind of hub for others, if we have more marejii. Or maybe it’s just that our ships know to look for travelers.”
Captain Nouresh pulled a magnifying eyepiece out of her pocket, peering closer at the circuitry in the FINNA. “It seemed like your world was so scared of strangers and strangeness. It gets covered up, renamed, cut up until it fits into a familiar skin. Like this.” She gestured at the guts of the FINNA, now spread out across their table. Ava was struck by how different some of the components were; there were bits of plastic, a circuit board, and the hex bolts that were a hallmark of all LitenVärld design. But other components were utterly alien: something that looked like neon-orange moss, crystals that glowed a dusky pink, bright brass gears, a glass vial that contained a swirling, crimson gas. “I can see the work of three different worlds in here, maybe four. But all they want you to see is this.”
She tapped the white LitenVärld logo on the gray plastic cover: the letters L and V in a cutesy, corporate font, and nestled between them, a sphere chopped into meridians and parallels. Ava thought about the training video, and the specs of the FINNA on the instructions booklet: Property of LitenVärld Inc., LLC.
Now that she thought of it, that same phrase had been printed onto the sky-blue polo that was her uniform, just below the tags. A reminder and a warning. Jules often called their job soul-killing, raged that retail was designed to wear down wage workers into hapless drones, too scared of poverty to rise up in revolution. It’s just a job, she’d always said. No better or worse than any other job.
