When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  “And the sick,” Tom said, wincing. “And the elderly.”

  I closed my eyes, remembering the looting, remembering stepping over dead bodies in the street.

  In his dimension, physics had been God. The National Laboratory had been funded through the roof. Forget the Space Race. Why go to the Moon when you could go to another world? But a few decisions by a team of physicists had led to the release of strange matter, a substance that consumed other substances, converting non-living matter into black rock.

  It had consumed half of New York in two days – buildings, sidewalks, street lights, cars, even the non-organic matter in the dirt, killing the grass and trees.

  And to think in my dimension Einstein had considered his letter to President Roosevelt recommending the development of an atomic bomb his greatest mistake.

  “The United Nations ordered an evacuation of Earth,” Tom reminded me. “By the time the strange matter had spread up to Canada and out into the North Atlantic Ocean they had set up clinics around the world, giving out an injection they called the ‘Solution.’ It changed our molecular structure and allowed us to slip through the gaps from one dimension to another.”

  A memory passed through my mind of the protesters who had stood outside the clinics, chanting anti-evacuation slogans as we lined up for our shots in Lincoln. I could hear their voices in my mind. “No child left behind! No child left behind! No child left behind!” I grimaced. It seemed George W Bush had managed to get elected in that dimension too.

  “And when they jabbed us with that needle we slid into another dimension, and the volume of sliders created a wormhole in the fabric of space and time that constantly brings us back to the date of the Evacuation,” Tom explained. “We were unable to keep track of each other, which was why no one under six years old was allowed the Solution.”

  I remembered hearing about a woman in South Africa who had driven her car into one of the clinics, killing herself and her three year-old daughter in protest. But the thought of a three year-old sliding into a dimension on its own made the orphanages set up by the United Nations look like the lesser of two evils.

  I sat up straighter as I realized the woman in the balaclava had arrived in my dreams around the time Tom had arrived in Green Grove. “My killer. Is she an evacuee?” I asked Tom.

  Tom pressed down on the accelerator, as if he was running from my question. “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth. “It took a few slides, but I finally heard evacuees had started killing their other selves and taking over their lives.” He glanced at me, appraising the look on my face, which would have been horror with a capital “H”.

  “You have to understand that when we slide into a new dimension we have no identity,” Tom continued, as if excusing these murderers. “It could be that we were never born or that we have a double in the dimension and have to go into hiding. The result is you have doctors working as janitors and celebrities entering lookalike competitions to make a buck.”

  “But how do they hide the bodies?” I asked, doing the math on billions of murders in infinite dimensions. “There would be dead doubles turning up all the time.” I thought of my other selves lying in shallow graves and shivered.

  Tom took a hand off the wheel and placed it on my thigh. My temperature rose at the warmth of his hand through my jeans. “There is no evidence,” he said. “This is how we kill our other selves.” He nodded at his hand. “When we touch them we merge with them. No muss, no fuss.”

  “What do you mean by ‘merge’?” I asked, once he had removed his hand and I could breathe again.

  “You could call it the opposite of mitosis.” He paused and looked thoughtful, as if trying to think of the antonym for cell division. “The molecules in our bodies recognize each other and merge together, leaving one where there used to be two.”

  “Like the flames,” I whispered, thinking of the two flames I had been watching in the bathtub. I thought of how many times the woman in the balaclava had reached out and touched me, spreading the cold through my body. I realized now that there had been no handgun or knives or other weapons.

  “How many times?” I asked in a low voice, thinking of the number of dreams – or dimensions – where I had been killed. “How many times have I been murdered by this Evacuee Lillie?”

  “I have witnessed her kill you four times. I managed to stop her in another eight dimensions.” His teeth were gritted as he relived my death over and over again.

  “Is that why you came to Green Grove? To Green Grove High?” I asked, my heart beginning to pound as I realized I could become number five. “To stop her from merging with me in this dimension?”

  He nodded and I thought about his car trailing me as I walked home and the sensation of being watched through my bedroom window. Then I remembered his words in the clearing: “I have to stop saving you, Lillie.”

  “And how is that working out for you? For me?” I asked, my eyes flicking to the pastures around us, as if my other self would rise from the grasses that waved at me in the dimming daylight.

  He looked at me, like it was a stupid question. After all, I was sitting in his car, safe and sound. “Fine,” he said at last, giving me a small smile.

  I released the breath I had been holding, but as it whooshed out of my chest, it was replaced by an emptiness as I thought about the four other Lillies she had killed. In particular, I wondered about the Lillie in the photo, which Tom had carried through multiple dimensions. “What happened to–?”

  “We were married,” Tom whispered. “We were living at Rose Hill. It was my seventh dimension and my first time in love with you.”

  A memory flashed into my mind of the greenhouse and then of the courtyard with the fountain. It was where he had proposed. A tear pricked my eye, like a bee sting. It explained my homesickness at Rose Hill. It also explained why I could see Tom on the polished dance floor of the ballroom and walking down the sweeping staircase, his hand resting on the carved banister. I had accessed her memories, the memories of the Lillie from his seventh dimension.

  “Evacuee Lillie killed your Lillie,” I whispered, realizing that it was the reason for his broken heart.

  “And our unborn baby.” For the first time his exterior was peeled back, as if the shiny paint had been stripped from a brand new car and underneath I had found a later model.

  My chest heaved with my own sorrow. It was going to be a girl. We were going to name her Rose after Rose Hill. “A beautiful flower, just like her mother,” Tom had said as he stroked my rounded belly.

  My hand went to my stomach and I had to remind myself again that they were not my memories. Instead they were the memories of a Lillie who had lived in another dimension, who had died in another dimension. I knew she had been older than me when she had died and the number twenty-four flashed in my mind. The vein in my temple throbbed as I thought of his words, his acknowledgement that she had been his first love. My sorrow subsided and another emotion surfaced – envy.

  I was jealous of this other me and for a moment I found myself wanting to live her life instead of my own. I could see myself reaching out towards her with a shaking hand and I shivered at the realization that I also had memories from the woman in the balaclava, aka Evacuee Lillie.

  “How can you tell an evacuee from a non-evacuee, like me?”

  Tom hesitated and then turned his head, pointing to the barcode tattoo behind his ear. “We bear this brand.”

  My fingers went to my own ear, brushing the hot skin behind it, knowing without looking that there was no matching tattoo. I had memories of other dimensions from my other selves, but I was from this dimension. “Jo has a tattoo,” I whispered. “Is she from your dimension?”

  Tom nodded and my heart squeezed, as if he had reached into my chest and closed his fist around it. “How? When?” My eyes stung with tears again as I realized that the Jo who had cut her hair and had thrown herself at Mr Bailey was an evacuee.

  I turned towards the window and let the tears ro
ll down my cheeks, as I thought about my Jo – the girl who had watched hundreds of hours of musicals with me, singing along to all of the songs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and laughing as I danced around her bedroom like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. “What if we called 911?” I asked suddenly.

  Tom shook his head. “You may as well be calling the Circle,” he said.

  “What is the Circle?”

  He gritted his teeth. “A band of vigilante evacuees. They have basically become our government.”

  “Then what if I went to the Circle?”

  Tom let out a short bark. “The Circle is all about the secrecy of the theory of everything. They have been terrorizing evacuees into merging since the Evacuation. If we decide not to merge they call us ‘Enemies of the Circle.’ I was added to their hit list a couple of hundred years ago,” he said, making them sound like bounty hunters. He glanced out his side window and it suddenly struck me that these vigilantes were just like his own Evacuee Lillie; a danger to his life.

  “The theory of everything has a price tag and the Circle does not want us selling state secrets.”

  “Dimension secrets,” I corrected dolefully.

  I thought about the pros and cons of merging for an evacuee. The pro column read like a thesis – a ready-made family, friends and career. That being said, Tom was not exactly a janitor. How could he drive a Benz and live in a mansion without following the example of the Circle like Evacuee Lillie? “How do you make a buck?” I asked, nervously shifting my weight on the plush leather seat.

  “I swindle my grandmother through Lorraine, while my other self is off at boarding school or skiing in the French Alps,” he told me. His tone was light-hearted, almost cheeky, but I could hear a twinge of guilt in his voice, as if he knew he was on easy street. Of course, he was. He was living the high life while others were cleaning toilets or killing themselves, but I was relieved to know I could tick him off the list of murderers.

  The sun had set by the time we pulled into my street. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the side mirror. I was pale and drawn under the streetlights, my dark circles making my eyes look like deep holes – wormholes. I stared into my eyes as if looking for my other selves through the fabric of space and time.

  As soon as the SUV came to a standstill, the front door swung open and Deb came running down the path with her hair billowing and bangles clacking, as if I had been gone a year instead of an afternoon.

  “Lillie! Where on Earth have you been?” she asked as I climbed out of the Benz. Dawn was standing in the open doorway behind her and I heard the rhythmic beat of bongos that told me Blaze was elsewhere in the house. “I tried your cell. I tried Jo.”

  “It was my fault, Ms Hart,” Tom said, climbing out of the SUV before I could remind Deb she had confiscated my cell, which was broken in any case. He gave my mother a smile that made her duck her head like a schoolgirl. Even I had to hold onto the edge of the door or be bowled over myself. That boy could have sold a drowning man a glass of water with that smile.

  Tom walked around the polished hood and stuck out his hand in introduction. “Tom Windsor-Smith.”

  Deb suddenly dropped his hand, like it had burst into flames, and then backed up the path as if Tom was a coyote she had met on a walking trail. I suddenly remembered her reaction to his last name yesterday when she had reverse-parked the car on the sidewalk. “Come on, Lillie,” she ordered, turning towards the house.

  I raised my eyebrows at Tom, whose lips had formed a thin line. “She used to think of me as a son,” he muttered as he watched his former mother-in-law slam the front door on his seventh dimension.

  The comment made me wonder about his parents. Lorraine had mentioned them, but it had seemed from our conversation that his grandmother was his guardian – in this dimension at least.

  “Lillie!”

  I sighed, reminding myself to make my mother a pot of chamomile tea. “Coming, Deb!” I looked down at my feet and cleared my throat, wondering how to say goodbye after our day together, after our lifetimes together.

  Tom moved towards me, lifting his hand to brush my cheek and my knees went weak under his touch. He leaned in and our lips met again. The tenderness of his kiss and the weight of his hands around my waist made me as hot as a sauna, despite the temperature being below fifty degrees.

  The front door opened again. “Lillie?” It was Dawn. “Your mother wants you to come inside. Now.”

  I separated myself from Tom reluctantly.

  “Sweet dreams,” he whispered, brushing my cheek again.

  I closed my eyes, soaking in his touch.

  “You know,” he said, as I turned towards the house. “Robert Frost was the guy who wrote that poem about the two roads. And in it, he says he wishes he could have traveled both.”

  He remained on the sidewalk, his arms folded against the cold, as I walked into the house, worlds apart from the girl who had walked out of it seven hours earlier.

  22

  I lay awake until the early hours of the morning, watching the shadows creep across my ceiling. Without Tom the questions had piled up again and I was beginning to feel like a pinprick of dust on a table, waiting for Evacuee Lillie to come along with a damp cloth.

  I thought of the hundreds of empty film canisters under my bed, but it was Tom who now held the ball of twine, who told me where I had been and where I was going.

  The headlights of a car passed through my bedroom for the fifth time, sweeping across my wall like a beam of light from a lighthouse. I listened to the hum of its engine, wondering if it was Tom. Maybe he was on patrol, doing laps, looking for the other Lillie.

  The thought warmed me like a hot water bottle and I snuggled under the covers, mulling over what he had told me at the sandhills. There were questions I had managed to answer on my own, like piecing together the corner and edge pieces of a puzzle.

  I remembered my hallucination in the darkroom last month, where he had disappeared into thin air, leaving me wondering if I was high from the chemicals. I now knew it had been a vision of another dimension where Tom had decided to pay me a visit, coming down to the darkroom where he knew we would be on our own. Maybe he had decided to clear it up from the get go, before he even gave me the lift in the rain or punched Jackson at the railroad crossing. I wondered if the Lillie from that dimension was miles ahead of me, packing overnight bags for Rose Hill.

  And then there was my conversation with Tom where he had claimed his rudeness was unlike him. In the memories I had from other dimensions Tom had been a gentleman through and through.

  I reached into my mind and saw myself sitting in the lounge at Rose Hill, one hand on my swollen stomach. I had been complaining about my constant cravings for peanut butter and pineapple. Ten minutes later I had a serving platter of what Tom called pineapple butter – slices of pineapple with peanut butter spread on them – which had made me laugh and Rose kick with glee, her foot stretching my skin.

  I lay the palm of my hand on my flat stomach and sighed, reminding myself again that these were not my memories. They were from another Lillie from another dimension – Lillie from the Seventh Dimension. I wondered when the two of us had split and who was the original.

  Neither, I thought. We were both clones of a Lillie who had long been lost in the infinite dimensions, splitting whenever two doors opened and she walked through both. I saw her as an onion being peeled layer by layer with each split and hugged myself, as if I could hold my own layers together.

  My eyes were hanging out of my head when Deb woke me the next morning for a shift at Tree of Life. My dark circles made me look like I had been sucker punched twice.

  I stood for twenty minutes with a customer who was tossing up between a poncho and a woolen sweater, daydreaming of the dimension where Deb had decided to let me sleep in and wondering if that Lillie was dreaming about me too.

  “What do you think?” the woman asked, pulling the garments down over her short, frizzy hair one at a time.

&nb
sp; I plastered on a smile and told her the poncho suited her body shape, like it mattered. She went with the sweater; I knew she had gone with the poncho in another dimension.

  I took my lunch break early and headed for the bakery.

  I scanned the tables for Tom, knowing this was where we had hung out in other dimensions. My heart sank when I saw he was a no-show. I stood in line behind a college guy who used to date Melissa and his new girlfriend, who I recognized from the Duck-In Diner.

  “Hungry?” a voice asked as I scanned the menu.

  I turned and saw Tom. He was looking picture-perfect as usual in a gray coat that made his pale blue eyes look wintry. He grinned down at me and I threw my arms around his neck, nuzzling into his collar until I found the warmth of his skin.

  “I kind of have a craving for pineapple butter,” I joked.

  “You remember,” he murmured, his arms squeezing me until I was breathless.

  Tom ordered two salad sandwiches with chips and freshly squeezed juice.

  “Pineapple?” I asked with a laugh when they delivered the tall glasses of bright yellow liquid to our table.

  “With a hint of peanut butter,” he responded with a wink.

  I smiled at his joke as I picked up half of my sandwich. “I have a thousand questions, but only twenty minutes for my lunch break.”

  He looked around and grimaced. “This is kind of public, Lillie,” he said, even though there was no one at the surrounding tables, except the college guy and the girl from the Duck-In Diner, who were in the middle of their own loved-up conversation.

  “You are such a scaredy-cat,” I teased. “A scaredy Tom-cat.”

  He looked at me with recognition and I knew it was a nickname he had been called by another Lillie. My mind went to the eight year-old Tom who had held her hand as they skated on the lake, going faster and faster until he called out for her to slow down.