Parallelities

by Alan Dean Foster

  Hoping against hope to find his old boss waiting for him, he was once again disappointed. The man who sat behind the desk in what should have been Kryzewski’s office possessed the same physical and vocal characteristics as the curmudgeonly old editor with whom Max had worked for over a year, but the face that looked up over the pile of printouts was just another distorted replication of Max Parker. Defeated and discouraged by the twin demons of Uncaring Fate and Barrington Boles, Max took an indifferent seat in the chair opposite this latest, puffy-faced, gruff version of himself.

  “How’re you doing, Max?” the seamed, elder mirror of himself inquired.

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances.” There, he thought. An honest answer.

  Parker Boss looked at him uncertainly, but both his personality and position allowed little if any time for in-depth probing of his employees’ state of mind. Since anything by way of reply short of “I just found out I have a terminal disease” or “I need an advance on next month’s salary” qualified as satisfactory, he shrugged off the reporter’s conspicuous lassitude and pressed on.

  “Got a live one for you.”

  Max perked up. Working on a story, even in a para that was not his, might help keep him from dwelling on his unfortunate situation. He knew it couldn’t be healthy to flinch inwardly every time he encountered a face that looked like his. If he didn’t do something soon, the flinch would take over the rest of him.

  “Saucerologists?” The UFOnuts were always good for a line or two, and the photo department loved them. It gave them the opportunity to put together some really inventive mock-ups in the computer. “Bigfoot? A turnip in the shape of Elvis’s head?”

  “Better.” Max’s enthusiastic response pleased the Kryzewski substitute. An interested and happy employee was a productive employee. “Here’s the particulars.” He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. Max pocketed it absently. “You ought to be able to get a full page out of this one. Maybe a page and a half.”

  “Pictures?”

  “It’s not that kind of story. Maybe we’ll be able to get something later, but I doubt it. The guy’s too serious. Don’t worry. Not your responsibility. Photolab will throw something usable together.”

  “Yeah, they always seem to.” Max rose and headed for the door.

  “Oh, and Parker?”

  “Yes, sir?” Max paused, his fingers on the door handle.

  “Talk to accounting when you get a chance. If you’ve got some vacation time coming I think you should take it. You don’t look well. I think some time off would do you good. Recharge the batteries, that sort of thing. Go on a trip, do some traveling. Get out of L.A. for a while.”

  Max smiled thinly. “I’ll look into it, sir, but I’m not really in the mood to go touring. Sometimes I think that’s all I do.” Leaving the editor to wonder what he meant by that, Max swung open the door and exited the office.

  His mind awhirl, he took a cursory glance at the info sheet he had been handed and marked the address in his memory as he made his way out of the building. Maxes of both genders in various stages of youth or advancing decomposition hailed him as he departed.

  He continued to ponder his situation as he pulled out of the underground garage and headed for Pico. That would be the fastest and simplest route to the address he had been given. There was so much on his mind, there were so many things he was trying to deal with simultaneously, that it did not occur to him that the address was that of his own building until he pulled up outside the gated garage.

  Frowning uncertainly, he checked the tip sheet. Nineteen hundred Appian Way. Sure enough, that was his address, his building. He let his gaze crawl farther down the paper.

  “Interview a Mr. Parker—funny coincidence, ain’t it?—in apartment 3F. Parker claims to have participated in an experiment put together by some rich nitwit up north of Malibu. I know it sounds like your standard mad-scientist scenario, but I think that if you can put your usual witty spin on it you might be able to do some good storytelling.

  “Seems this crazy claims to have built a machine that can access parallel worlds, and this Parker, who insists he’s a stringer for, of all things, the Investigator, actually let himself be used as a guinea pig in its first tryout. Now he says he’s being tormented by dreams of other worlds, and he wants to tell his story. The interviewer on the phonebank who took his call asked him why, if he’s a stringer for us, he didn’t write up the story himself, but he says that since yesterday he’s been plagued with visions of himself slipping in and out of reality and until they go away he’s afraid to leave his apartment. As if his apartment’s any more real than the rest of the world. Can you beat that?

  “There might be a nice little yarn here. See what you can get out of him. But watch yourself. I got the ol’ gut feeling this one could be violent.”

  He wouldn’t be violent, Max knew as he let the paper slip from his limp fingers. He knew the man would not be violent because Maxwell Parker was not a violent man. Ignoring the cars that were forced to slow on the narrow hill street and then go around him, he let his gaze rise to the top floor of the building. His building.

  The Kryzewski-Parker had sent him out to interview himself.

  Only, this Max Parker did not differ in age, or ethnic background, or gender. This was a Max Parker who claimed to be a writer for the Investigator, who lived in Max Parker’s building, and who was even now waiting for Max Parker in Max Parker’s apartment. Inevitably, he found himself wondering just who was the real Max Parker: himself, or the anguished individual waiting upstairs?

  What if it was the one waiting upstairs?

  Then I’d just be a para, he thought with icy calm. And the Max upstairs is the one who should be going back to the real world. Trouble was, they were all real worlds.

  That way lies madness, he assured himself. I know who I am. I’m me, and he’s him, and all these other Maxes are themselves. But that was not quite the case. None of the other multiple Maxes except Mitch had claimed to be writers for the Investigator, he reminded himself, nor did they live in his apartment.

  What would happen when he confronted the man upstairs? Would one of them disappear, canceled out by the reality of the other? Or would one of them finally flee to the peaceful land of the insane? Or would they both? Or was he crazy already?

  Parallel worlds and Barrington Boles, and a space-time continuum that’s full of holes, he sang silently to himself. In the midst of them all, why not a world populated by nothing but Maxwell Parkers, ad hominem, ad infinitum? And if you take blueberries and paint them red, they taste more like cranberries than rhubarb does.

  He could sit in his car until reality or death overtook him, or he could keep moving, keep living. He chose to keep moving.

  Unsurprisingly, the garage gate yielded to his key-ring remote. Another Aurora was parked in his space and he slid his own into one of the two empty slots reserved for guests of tenants. In spite of everything he had been through, there was something surpassing strange about having to park in the guest space in his own building. Locking the car, he marched grim-faced toward the elevator.

  There’s nothing here to fear, he told himself. You’re just paying a little visit on you, much as a Max named Mitch once did. Maybe you can even help the poor guy. After all, you’re probably responsible for at least several of his bad dreams.

  On second thought, maybe his unexpected appearance would not be so salutary after all. But then, since everyone in this world looked more or less like Max Parker, why should the appearance of yet one more startle another?

  Before he could change his mind and back out, he found himself confronting an all-too-familiar door. It was 3F, the entrance to his apartment down to the scratches in the paint near the bottom where Mr. Kraus’s dog had attempted to claw its way in. Thumbing the bell, he waited for a response, half hoping none would be forthcoming.

  He heard the security chain rattle in its holder, and the door opened.

  The man standi
ng there was him, all right. Not a close copy, this time, or one distorted by a different haircut or darker complexion or excess avoirdupois, but as exact a duplicate as could be imagined. Only the expression was different. Where he was anxious and resigned, the Maxwell Parker standing in the portal looked harried and apprehensive, as if he had not slept in a long time.

  That was understandable, Max thought, if the poor schmuck’s dreams were in any way shape or form mirroring Max’s multiple realities.

  The man jumped slightly as soon as he got a good look at his visitor. “Christ, I know that everybody looks more or less like everybody—that’s the natural state of the world—but I’ve never met anyone before who looked so much like me!”

  “You don’t know the half of it, bud. Or the multiplicity. Can I come in?” He felt like a prize fool asking for permission to enter his own apartment, except that it was not his apartment. It belonged to this Max Parker, and he had no intention of being hauled off to the Lincoln Street jail by blue-clad clones of himself for forcibly violating the privacy of another version of him.

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure you can come in.” His other self stepped aside. “You’re from the paper, aren’t you? They called and said they might send someone out. Can I get you a drink? I’ve got…”

  “Two six-packs of Hinano, a half-empty liter of diet RC, and a couple of bottles of flavored iced tea. I know.” Pushing past the dumbfounded copy of himself, he headed for the kitchen.

  With an expression that was a mixture of astonishment and confusion, his other self trailed behind. “That’s exactly right. I’ll be damned. How’d you know that?” His tone turned suspicious. “The paper have somebody check out my place while I was at work? That’s breaking and entering.”

  “Not if the manager lets them in, but don’t sweat it. It never happened. I can assure you that nobody’s been spending time in this apartment except Maxwell Parker.”

  Max fumbled in the fridge until he found a chilled tea. Popping the vacuum seal, he sat down at the table and took a long, cold swallow. Then he looked over the tabletop at his troubled but curious self.

  “Then how did you know what…?” the local M. Parker started to ask. Gesturing grandly with the tea bottle, Max cut him off.

  “Why don’t you tell me a little about these dreams of yours.”

  The other Max hesitated, as if trying to make up his mind whether to respond genially to the extraordinary intrusion or call the cops. After a moment or two, he decided to cooperate. Max knew he would. If there was one set of reactions he could predict, it was his own. Helping himself to a beer from the door of the fridge, the other Max sat down in the chair opposite. There he sat and gazed across the table in abiding wonder at the perfect, and perfectly at home, archetype of himself.

  “You promise you won’t laugh? I thought the girl I spoke to at the paper was going to laugh.”

  “Believe me,” Max told him somberly, “you are looking at the last person in the world who’d laugh at you.”

  “Okay, then.” Feeling a little more comfortable in the presence of, what was after all, himself, the Maxwell Parker of this particular para started in. “This is going to sound crazy, and it’s thrice wacko, because I’m usually interviewing the weirdos, not setting myself up as one.”

  “I know,” Max told him gently.

  His counterpart looked at him uncertainly, but continued. “I keep seeing myself in this other life, or other world, or other someplace. Everything’s normal there. I’m still a writer, still single, still living here at the beach. Only, there’s this wild, wealthy inventor character there named Boles. Barrington Boles.” Max nodded and held out his recorder, numb and unresponsive. Mistaking his glazed expression for a sign of interest, the other Max became more voluble.

  “So my editor gives me a tip that this Boles character might be good for a story because he claims to have built something that’s sort of like a gate between parallel worlds. What he calls paras, for short. His idea is that everyplace and everything has lots of paras. So I go out there, and he’s not at all like what I expect.”

  “You mean he’s sensible, and seems sane,” Max supplied quietly.

  His double nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it exactly. Anyway, it’s clear right away that he has plenty of money, but in spite of appearances I’m still not sure about the sense part. He takes me downstairs, and the place is fitted out like a new ride at Universal Studios. He tells me that I’m real lucky, because I’m going to be present for this room-sized gadget’s first full run-through. So while he’s busy lighting the place up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, I decide to take a little stroll and check everything out. And like a fool, I find myself stepping under this flickering arch.” He smiled wanly, a smile Max knew all too well.

  “The result is that I end up being the guinea pig for the guy’s initial tryout.” He laughed hollowly. “I mean, can you imagine anybody being that stupid?”

  “Actually, I can.” Max looked away.

  “Yeah, well, you must know dumber people than me. Anyway, I don’t really feel a thing, but it turns out that I come out of this crazy contraption well and truly zapped, you know? But I don’t know anything’s wrong until I’m asleep.”

  “What happens then?” Max prompted him.

  His counterpart hesitated, but having decided to tell all, could hardly find a decent excuse not to continue. “It’s hard to describe. I think what’s happening is that in my dreams I keep seeing myself slipping between these paras he alluded to. Each dream takes me to a different one, and I’m telling you, they’re so goddamn real you can practically smell them.” He leaned back and crossed his arms, gazing out at the placid Pacific.

  “But I know they’re not real, that they’re only dreams.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice significantly. “Want to know how I know?”

  “I’d be very interested,” Max assured him dryly.

  The other Max stared unblinkingly into his visitor’s eyes. “Because they’re too fantastic. Dream worlds come out of and are based on our own personal realities. They’re not like the inventions of some crackpot novelist out to sell fragments of his imagination for a few bucks. And these dream paras, well, even the least of them is just too extreme to be believed.” He sat back in his chair.

  “Now, if they made some sense, bore any relation to the real world, I might really be worried. But as it is, I think they’re pretty harmless. They just ruin my sleep. What I’m thinking, and the reason I called your paper, is that the vividness of them might be worth sharing.” He winked. “You know what I mean?”

  “Why don’t you write about them yourself?” Max inquired apathetically. “Don’t you work for a weekly tabloid newspaper?”

  “Got some background on me, did you?” The other Max grinned. “That’s para for the course.” His expression twisted. “Sorry. Bad joke. But I thought you’d understand. I have this strange feeling we share a lot in common besides looks.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’d have to agree with that.”

  “I work for the National Enquirer.” The other Max stated it proudly, as though it was significant of something.

  Max looked dubious. “Never heard of it.”

  His other self frowned. “Come on, man. Don’t put me on. The Enquirer has the largest circulation of any tabloid in the country.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.” The tiny green light that indicated the status of the batteries in Max’s recorder had gone to red, but he did not bother to stop and change them. This interview was not going anywhere anyhow. Even if it was, he could fake whatever else his counterpart might choose to say.

  Everything the local Max had said about Barrington and parallelities and the effects of the Boles Field rang true—but what was this Enquirer nonsense?

  Before he could think of a follow-up query that would not make him sound like a complete lunatic, the other Max was shaking a knowing finger at him. “I get it. You’re testing me.”

  “Testing you?” The bew
ilderment in Max’s voice was genuine.

  “Sure. To see if I’m crazy.” He grinned understandingly. “Hey, if I was in your position, I’d do the same thing. But I think you could have come up with something a little more subtle. Imagine another tabloid reporter claiming never having heard of the Enquirer! Stick to that line and you’ll have me wondering if you’re the crazy one.”

  Enquirer, Enquirer. Could there be a large but highly localized scandal sheet by that name somewhere back East, or maybe overseas? Max racked his memory and drew only blanks. Since he knew he was not insane, the only conclusion he could come to was that the publication in question had to be a para tabloid paper in this parallel world.

  Careful now, he warned himself. Tread cautiously or you’re liable to lose your perspective here. This guy is the para Max, you’re the genuine one. The first Max, the Max prime. Focus on that and whatever happens, don’t lose sight of it.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told his double finally.

  “I thought it wouldn’t.” The other Max chuckled. “‘Never heard of the National Enquirer.’ Yeah, sure. Anyway, you see why I can’t write this up myself. Can’t file a report on my own dreams. We’re supposed to go outside for our stories. No way my editor would buy anything so personal. But you could do it, and we can both make a couple of bucks.” Content with this explanation, he waited for a response. When none was forthcoming from his dull-visaged visitor, he tried to encourage him.

  “How about it? I know it’s a wild story, even for your typical tabloid dream yarn, but we can polish it to the point where it’s acceptable. Hell, I can even do the rough draft for you. Or you can listen to me ramble and do your own thing from the transcription. None of your readers need to know what I do for a living.” He continued enthusiastically.

  “I’m telling you, when you hear about some of the places I’ve been in my sleep lately you’ll be glad you don’t have the same kind of dreams. It’s been pretty damn unsettling. I figure getting it out, telling it to somebody else, could be good therapy for me. Because I’ll tell you, sometimes they feel so authentic, sometimes I’m so right there, that I wake up in a cold sweat from the reality of it.” He took a long swig of his beer.