by E. C. Myers
Jena smirked.
It was incredibly surreal to see himself standing on the other side of the room, not so much like looking in a mirror, but more like an out-of-body experience—like he was somehow standing outside of himself, looking at his own body.
His other self seemed just as fascinated, but a moment later his stunned expression changed to contempt.
“This is yours,” the analog said. He threw the backpack to the floor at Ephraim's feet. Then he put an arm around Jena's waist. “And this is mine.”
Jena stepped on his foot. The analog yelped and let her go.
Ephraim checked inside the bag. His tuxedo was crammed in there. Nathan's video camera was on top, along with the paperback Dickens novel he'd found in his room at Greystone Manor.
“Nice of the Doc to return my stuff,” Ephraim said. “She didn't expect me to come back either.”
“Hugh packed those,” Jena said. “He says good-bye.”
“Tell him I said thanks. For everything.” Ephraim couldn't have used the coin to get away if Hugh hadn't switched off the LCD.
“Hold on.” The analog strode to the bag and snatched the strip of condoms peeking out from the Dickens book. “You won't be needing these,” he said. He winked at Jena.
“Ugh,” Jena said. “You won't need them either. Not with me.”
The analog shrugged. “There are plenty of options in the multiverse. Where does he keep the coin?” he asked.
Jena glanced at Ephraim. “Right pants pocket,” she said. “I checked. It's there.”
“Jena,” Ephraim said.
The analog walked up to Ephraim, smiling thinly, and punched him in the face. Ephraim saw stars and ended up face-down on the carpet. His eye was already throbbing.
Through the dull buzzing in Ephraim's ears he heard Jena shout his name, but he didn't know which of them she was talking to. She sounded freaked.
The analog reached into his right pocket. Ephraim tried to twist away. He kicked out at him, but the analog danced away.
He held the coin up between his finger and thumb to show Ephraim. It flashed once in the light before he flipped it over to Jena.
“Last summer I went through hell because of you,” the analog said. “I didn't know what had happened, but I learned pretty quickly that I had to stop telling people that the world had changed around me. No one remembered anything was ever any different.
“Eventually I figured out I was in a parallel universe, but I kept that to myself. You turned my mother into an alcoholic, you douche. You made me live like a poor person.”
“I tried to swap everyone back where they came from,” Ephraim said.
“Only so you could feel good about yourself.”
“No,” Ephraim said. “I'm sorry. I don't know why it didn't work.” He sat up, massaging his temple. He winced with the pain.
“I think I do,” Jena said. “Eph, it wasn't your fault. While you're in a universe with the coin and someone has a controller, that universe can't split off. But as soon as you and Nate left, it was able to branch just like any other universe. Every decision spawned another, similar universe—with whichever Ephraim analog was in it at the time.”
“Even though Zoe and I backtracked through the universes I'd visited with the Charon device, we only returned the analogs from the parent universes.” He closed his eyes, but he opened them again when he saw bright spots against his eyelids. He was having trouble focusing his left eye.
“You're from one of the universes that branched off.” Ephraim climbed to his feet slowly. “I had no idea. I wanted to put everything right.”
His analog scowled. “You ruined my life, so I'm taking yours.”
“It's time to leave,” Jena said to the analog. She slotted the coin in the controller. “If you wanted revenge, you got it. If I know Eph, this is going to eat him up with guilt.”
She looked at Ephraim. “You did your best, like you always do. But you should know by now that you can't fix everything.”
She pressed a button, and the coin hovered and spun to the coordinates she'd set.
“No, Jena!” Ephraim headed for her, but the analog shoved him back. Ephraim swung at him. The analog ducked and tackled him to the floor.
“I'm ashamed to share the same DNA as you.” The analog pinned Ephraim under him.
“I'm more than my DNA,” Ephraim said through gritted teeth. “I'm sorry you've wasted your potential.”
“Boys, please,” Jena said. “Don't be an idiot, Eph. The coin is programmed for the lab. If you grab it now, you'll just end up exactly where you don't want to be. They're waiting for you. This is over.”
She pulled the analog off Ephraim. She took the analog's hand, and he grinned.
“Jena,” Ephraim said. “You're way too smart for this. You have another plan, right? Your mother, your father…Dr. Kim can't protect them.” She was just pretending to go along with Dr. Kim. She had to be. But he couldn't figure out why.
“Neither can you,” Jena said. “Good-bye, Ephraim.”
The analog closed his hand over the coin, and they disappeared.
Ephraim sat on his bed, staring at the spot where his analog and Jena had been a second ago.
The only advantage he'd had was gone with them. Without the coin, Ephraim was at the mercy of the decohering universes. He could become a different person at any moment or disappear entirely and he'd never even know it; worse still, no one else would notice either.
Someone knocked on his open bedroom door. His mom poked her head in.
“Honey? Is everything—” She took one look at his face and flew into the room. “Oh, my God! What happened? Are you all right?”
“No,” he said.
“How did you hurt your eye?” she asked.
“I sort of did it to myself.” He laughed.
She sat next to him on the bed. “Where's Jena? Did she hit you?”
He shook his head.
She wrapped her arms around him and he closed his eyes. He pressed his face against her shoulder like he had when he'd been a little kid, running to his mother with a skinned knee.
“You're, um, crying, sweetie,” she said.
Ephraim swiped the back of his hand against his cheeks and brushed away the hot tears.
“Something got in my eyes,” he said.
“I believe it's called sadness. What's going on? I didn't see Jena leave.”
“She left in a hurry,” Ephraim said. “With the other me.”
“Other you?” Her eyes widened. “That boy Jena was with—”
“Mom. I'm the real one. It's me. Ephraim.”
She stared into his eyes, and he saw the moment she understood him. “Eph?”
“Yes,” he said. “I'm home.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She hugged him even tighter than before.
“I saw the video Nathaniel recorded of how you left the prom, disappearing with that device,” she said.
Ephraim tensed at her mention of Nathaniel before he remembered that she always called Nathan by his full first name.
“So. Two Jenas, huh?” she said.
Ephraim ducked his head.
“What's her name? The other one? Zoe. Is she…are you two…?” she asked.
“We are. But I don't think it's going to work out,” Ephraim said.
“The morning after prom, I found you lying in bed. With a hangover and a hickey.” She frowned disapprovingly. “If I hadn't known you'd left, I wouldn't have realized someone else had replaced you. Even though your double kept calling me Mad, and he was unbelievably rude to Jim. Isn't that awful?”
“He's okay? Jim?”
“He doesn't understand any of this. Not that I get it all either. He bought all these DVDs about quantum physics and we've been watching them together.”
“They wouldn't really cover this sort of thing,” Ephraim said. “The Ephraim who's been here the past few days was another version of me from another universe. Like that body you saw from last year.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I wanted to kill this one myself. He's a punk. Whenever I started to forget that he wasn't you, I watched Nathaniel's video again. To see you. To remind myself that you were still out there, somewhere.” Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “I knew you'd come home.”
She looked exhausted, like she usually did after work. She was even more tired lately with the paralegal classes she'd started taking in the spring.
“Are you here to stay?” she asked. “Is everything…done?”
“Depends on your definition of ‘done.’ It's out of my control now. It's a long story, Mom, and I'm tired.”
She was distracted by something on his computer screen. “It's still happening,” she said softly.
Ghosts flickered on the screen, brighter and more opaque than they'd been in the video. A parallel version of Madeline Scott walked past them and picked up some socks from the floor. A phantom Ephraim and Jena were fooling around on the bed, where they'd been a short time ago. A man leaned over the computer screen. She sucked in a short breath.
“David? Ephraim, is that your father?”
The man walked into the bedroom, looked around for a moment, and peered at the screen. Ephraim got a good look at his face. It sure looked like his father, the way Ephraim remembered him.
“Is that possible?” his mother asked.
She turned, but the space where his father should have been was empty. She reached a hand out, but there was nothing to touch. When she looked back at the screen, David Scott was gone. Ephraim had watched him walk out of the room, fading with each step.
“That wasn't Dad,” Ephraim said. “He just looked like him. Parallel universes are overlapping with ours. And once in a while, something or someone gets through.”
A phantom Ephraim on the bed slipped his hand under a phantom Jena's shirt, and she arched her back. He leaned forward and kissed her neck. Ephraim's mother squinted at the screen.
“Well, that's enough of that,” she said. She switched off the monitor.
“Mom, we've never done that here before. I swear,” he said.
“'Here'?” she asked.
“I mean ever. I don't even know what they're doing.”
“It's too late for that talk, I imagine.” She tousled his hair. “But you'll always be my little boy. My little, virginal boy.”
“Mom,” he said.
“Even when you and Jena—sorry, Zoe, give me cute little grandchildren, I'm going to assume they were made without sex.”
“Too bad you can't meet Doug,” Ephraim said.
“It's weird that cameras can pick up those…what do you call them?”
“Quantum phantoms. You're right. It is weird.” Ephraim got up and headed for the desk. He switched the screen on.
“I really don't need to see any more of that, Eph,” his mom said.
He studied the phantoms moving across the screen. “Why is my camera still picking up other universes?” Ephraim asked. “I don't have the coin anymore.”
“You mean a coin makes that happen?”
“It's half of a really powerful device, the thing we used to travel between universes,” Ephraim said.
“Where's the other half?”
“Jena has it. Hugh Everett has one too.” Her eyes widened when she heard the name.
Ephraim looked at the bag his analog had dropped in his room.
He dumped it out onto his bed, and he and his mother studied the contents. The rumpled tuxedo, Nathan's camera, the book. Good thing his analog had taken the condoms with him.
He checked all the compartments of the backpack, but there was nothing else inside it.
His mother picked up the tuxedo jacket and shook it out. She reached into the inner pocket and pulled out something small and silver.
“Whose phone is this?” she asked.
“Phone?” he asked. “That's it!”
“It was in your jacket.” She handed it to him.
“This is the controller,” he said. “The other half of the device.” Hugh must have slipped the device in there, knowing that Ephraim's analog would bring it right to Ephraim.
“Does that do you any good?”
“I don't know, but it's the best I've got. Now I might be able to do something. What, I'm not sure, but something,” he said.
He flipped the controller open. It still responded to his touch.
This was a total game changer. The game still sucked, but it was like he'd just been handed a secret code that had gotten him an extra continue.
“You'll figure it out, honey. How about some tea? Tea solves everything. And maybe you can try to explain this to me a little better.”
He smiled. “Do we have any gummy bears?”
“I'm sure we do. Jim is always buying candy. But he's probably eaten all the green ones. I'll put the water on.”
She smiled and left the room.
Ephraim took a quick shower and got dressed. It felt good to be wearing his clothes again. He pocketed the controller and threw Nathan's camera, Everett's audiocassette, and the loop of copper wire from 1954 into Hugh's backpack. Then he arranged the rental tuxedo on its hanger, minus the shoes, and brought them both out to the kitchen.
A man was slumped over the table.
“Jim?” Ephraim said. He rushed over to the man's side.
It wasn't Jim. The man had black hair with a scattering of silver and only the first signs of thinning. His skin was a rich brown, like he'd spent a lot of time in the sun. He was breathing shallowly.
“Dad?” Ephraim asked. “Mom! You'd better get in here!”
He didn't know how she'd missed her ex-husband passed out in her kitchen when she was making the tea. Ephraim glanced at the stove. There was no kettle on the burner.
“Mom?” Ephraim called.
He left his father at the table and ran through the apartment, checking all the rooms for his mother. She was gone, and so was any sign that she lived there. Ephraim broke into a nervous sweat.
He hurried back to the kitchen and grabbed the cordless phone from the wall. He nudged his father's shoulder. He couldn't believe this was happening to him again, with his other parent.
The man lifted his head and groaned. “Ephraim?” he said in a thick voice.
Only his dad pronounced his name that way: “Eff-ra-heem.” He knew that voice too, though he hadn't heard it in person in nearly eight years; the rumbling baritone with its shadow of a Latino accent had read books to Ephraim when he was a boy. He still heard some books that way in his head when he reread them.
“Dad?” Ephraim asked. “David Scott?”
Ephraim leaned on the table for support. The last time he'd seen his father, Ephraim had been ten years old. He went to bed one night, and the next morning, when he came out of his room for breakfast, the bookshelves in the living room were bare and his mother was crying on the floor with a split lip and a black-and-blue cheek.
He'd thought his father had abandoned them, but later he found out that Madeline Scott had kicked her husband out of the apartment, and out of their lives. After that, he stopped wanting his father to call him.
“Did I fall asleep?” David Scott asked in a slurred voice.
Ephraim made a fist.
His mother standing up for herself, protecting Ephraim, divorcing his dad—that was the bravest thing Ephraim had ever known anyone to do. Even if she fell apart after David Scott was gone.
Ephraim hadn't seen the man's face since then, except in old pictures his mother had hidden from him. She'd sent everything that belonged to his father to an address in San Juan. Ephraim had only gotten two birthday cards, on the wrong day, and a single phone call from the man since.
“Dad,” Ephraim said.
“I heard the voices again,” his father said.
“The voices?” Ephraim said cautiously.
There was a Sudoku book, a pencil, a box of Entenmann's donuts, and a mug in front of his father on the table. Ephraim lifted the empty cup and sniffed it.
Vodka. There hadn't been any of it in the house for a year, or alcohol of any kind. The smell of it made Ephraim feel sick.
“Dad, look at me,” Ephraim said.
David Scott looked up blearily. His eyes were bloodshot and he was unshaven. He seemed fifteen years older, not eight. His hair needed a good trim. It was late at night, but it didn't look like he'd been out of his threadbare pink terrycloth robe all day, if all week.
“What?” his dad said.
“Where's Mom?” Ephraim asked. His voice choked up, and he blinked back tears.
His father slapped the table. The pencil bounced and rolled off the table.
“Don't start that.” He glared at Ephraim. Just like that, his anger disappeared and he looked sad, tired, and old. “I don't want to talk about her anymore. I…can't. The doctor said…it upsets me.” He looked down at the Sudoku book. The top row of nine squares were filled in. Ephraim shivered when he saw the numbers: 9, 0, 9, 8, 7, 7, 11, 1, and 9. The coordinates for Nathaniel's universe.
“She was just here,” Ephraim said. “Mom. I spoke to her.”
Something flickered across the man's face. Hope? But it was quickly replaced by the deepest sadness Ephraim had ever seen on another person's face.
“You don't really believe she was here.” His father looked at him with fear and concern. “Ephraim. You don't, do you?” He grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip.
“No! Of course not. Let go of me.”
His father shoved his hand away. “I don't want you to get like this. Like me.”
“What's wrong with you?” Ephraim asked. He sat next to his father.
“What isn't?” David Scott said.
His father's shoulders sagged, and he squeezed his Sudoku book between his hands.
“I heard her voice. I don't know where she's gone, but she's never coming back,” his father said.
He rubbed at the Sudoku page with an eraser, scrubbing away the numbers from the squares at the top. Ephraim looked more closely and saw that the entire page had been filled in with numbers and erased.
“Things haven't been the same since…” His father tapped a staccato rhythm on the table with the eraser.
“Since Mom left?”
His father shoved the Sudoku book away from him. “Since you were born.”
