The Alternate Universe

by The Alternate Universe [MM] (epub)

  “I do?” his dad grinned as if he couldn’t imagine anything more delightful. “Well, you look amazing.” Leaning over, he grabbed and squeezed Claude’s hand.

  Claude pulled away surprised. As he looked suspiciously at his dad’s still outstretched hand and grinning face, he asked, “Are you joking?”

  “No bunkum,” he said, still smiling as he brought two fingers to his forehead in a mock salute. “I’ve never been more serious. You look amazing. The house looks amazing. The crumbs on the floor look fantastical.”

  Claude blinked several times. “Have you been drugging or something?”

  His dad threw his head back and laughed uproariously. “Neither drugged nor corned!” he shouted, jabbing the air with a pointed finger.

  “Corned? What are you talking about?”

  “It means drunk.”

  “In what language?”

  His dad offered a mock frown. “I’m sorry, Claude. I don’t mean to cock your hat.”

  “Stop that.”

  “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

  “Will you stop? Whatever you’re doing, it’s not funny.” His playfulness seemed to only underscore Claude’s exhaustion. Why the Hades was he in such a good mood?

  His dad looked genuinely contrite. “Sorry. I’m awfully tired and truly, truly happy to see you. In fact, I almost grabbed you when I saw you snoozing on the couch but decided to let you rest, and I needed to work.”

  Claude leaned back and crossed his arms. “Work on what?”

  His dad opened his mouth but nothing came out. He looked at his tablet and then at Claude and then at the tablet again. “I can’t say. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Why not?” Claude leaned forward to peer at the screen, but his dad pulled the tablet closer.

  “For one thing, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got to finish these notes before I forget. I’ll tell you later.” He often said that his moments of inspiration were fleeting, and if he didn’t get his thoughts down instantly, they might be lost forever.

  “But Dad…”

  “It’s late. You should be in bed.”

  “So should you.”

  “Right. It’s just that I …” His voice trailed off, and he smiled wanly.

  “What?”

  His dad shrugged. “It’s hard to know where to begin. You saw Carolien’s moving picture, right?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well.” He released a long sigh.

  Claude expected him to say more but his eyes had already drifted back to the screen.

  “Did you change your clothes?”

  His dad looked down at his shirt. “Uh, yeah. I guess so.”

  “You’re acting weird, you know that?”

  His dad looked up, and his eyes glowed with a strange, sleepless excitement. “Lordy, you look good.”

  “Lordy, Dad? Did you say lordy?”

  His dad combined a deep breathe with a hearty yawn. “Go to bed,” he said gently.

  Claude felt like he was dreaming. He leaned on the table; it was solid, its surface familiarly sticky with traces of old meals. He scanned the room. Everything was where it was supposed to be: The empty napkin holder he’d made out of spoons in 3rd grade, the toaster they called Bernie because it burned everything even on the lowest setting, the shelf of dusty cookbooks that had sat unused ever since his mom’s departure. His dad used to say that the kitchen was the most important room in the house: it was where families were happiest, conversations free-flowing, and ideas sprang to life.

  Perhaps there was nothing strange about the moment except the late hour. Perhaps his mash-up with Jayesh had stirred up feelings that left him unsettled. Perhaps his dad had exceeded his usual single glass of chianti, or maybe the steam generated by some brilliant new idea had fogged his brain. Whatever the cause, Claude felt a vague unease, a yearning for something the world couldn’t supply.

  “What would you do if you fell for someone who was different from you?” Claude asked. His own question surprised him. Was he actually asking for advice?

  “What?” his dad asked, still typing.

  “If you met a woman,” he continued, even though he sensed the effort was fruitless. “A beautiful woman who vibed you cosmically in a physical way and you liked being with, had fun with, but who had completely different friends and interests. Say she thought science was stupid. What would you do?”

  “Um.” His dad continued to stare intently at the tablet. Then he slowly lifted his gaze. “Wait. Are you saying you met a girl? I thought you were a boys-only boy. What’s that thing you used to say? A hundred and ten percent homo.”

  Claude rolled his eyes and shook his head. “You’re missing the point. I was asking what you would do if you met a yummy female.”

  “Yummy?”

  “Voluptuous.”

  “Oh.” He nodded slowly. “What was the question again?”

  Claude was too tired to feel angry but just the right amount of tired to feel frustrated. “Never mind.”

  “You’re right. Now’s not a good time. We’ll talk later, OK?”

  He wanted to shake him, but imagined that if he reached out, he’d find only air, his father a mirage.

  His dad hammered at the backspace key. “There’s some stuff I need to get down.”

  “Sure thing.” As Claude stood, he saw the riddle he’d solved next to the tablet. “I guess you saw that?” he asked, pointing to the sheet on which he’d written and circled “Hi” in large letters.

  His dad glanced at the page. “Yeah, nice,” he said. “How long did it take you?”

  “Not long.”

  “Good,” he said, giving him a wink.

  “Night.” Claude pushed open the swinging kitchen door and headed through the darkened house to his bed.

  Chapter Nine

  Claude Finds a Note

  Claude woke with the sun in his eyes. He glanced at the clock: 6:39 a.m. He yawned and stretched, finding that his muscles were stiff and sore, as if he’d overextended them. He closed his eyes, enjoying the sensation of the sun on his face.

  His father had once told him that photons from the sun traveled over 90 million miles to reach Earth. It had seemed an impossibly large distance, boring in its vastness, but as he thought about it now, the idea seemed thrilling. It was miraculous that particles could travel so far to transfer their energy to his cheeks, infusing them with warmth. The sun itself was reaching out and touching him, touching the whole universe, in fact, since the vast majority of the sun’s photons traveled unimpeded through space, destined to survive for millions of years until they reached… what? The edge of the universe? Is there an edge?

  Claude went to the bathroom and washed up. As he dried his face, he made his way down the hall to his dad’s room. The door was open, which meant he was probably awake, but the wireless wasn’t blaring the day’s headlines, as it usually did. Claude poked his head through the doorway.

  “Dad?” he said tentatively. The drapes were open and the room empty. The bed was unmade, but then it always was. He peeked into the bathroom. Empty. The sink was dry and so was the shower.

  The kitchen was empty, too. There were no new dishes in the sink. There was coffee in the bean-brewer but it was cold, as if it had been there for days. The room was silent except for the clicking of the clock over the kitchen table: 6:45. It was early, even for his dad. Claude thought it likely that he’d gone straight to the office, skipping sleep.

  On the dining room table, he found a note.

  claude: again, un-timely

  interference; over night call at last lousy minute; emergency meeting; sorry! away ‘til—unknown; really not

  opportune; please eat nicely son; stay at finley—eek! take elegant Donna my best. always, dad

  He read the note again. stay at finley. His mother lived on Finley Lane. But it was a strange way of putting it. please eat nicely son? eek? elegant Donna? It didn’
t sound like his dad, who hated fragments and run-ons, so that could only mean one thing: the note was a puzzle.

  He yawned. He didn’t feel like solving a stupid brain teaser and yet hoped that the puzzle would reveal that his dad really hadn’t gone anywhere after all and that Claude wouldn’t have to stay at Millstone’s.

  He grabbed a pencil and piece of paper and sat down. He read the note several times. The word eek! intrigued him. Did it have special meaning? E was the fifth letter of the alphabet, and there were a lot of words in the note with five letters: again, night, sorry, nasty, Donna. The sentence take elegant Donna my best had five words. The note also contained five forms of punctuation. Claude moved the words around, looking for a pattern. He turned them into their numeric equivalents (with a corresponding to 1, b to 2 and so on).

  He broke down emergency like this:

  E M E R G E N C Y

  5 13 5 18 7 5 14 3 25

  Meeting became:

  M E E T I N G

  13 5 5 20 9 14 7

  What did the numbers mean? he asked himself. It occurred to him that there were endless ways to analyze, organize, and break down the contents of the short note; the task suddenly seemed overwhelming.

  He folded the paper and placed it in the outer pocket of his rucksack, and then poured himself a bowl of Flan-Flavored Micro-Donut Holes before jumping in the shower.

  Chapter Ten

  An Unwelcome Request

  “I won’t do it.”

  Jonathan spoke calmly, trying to ignore the fact that he was wristcuffed.

  The old man looked amused, like a parent marveling at a child’s pointless tantrum. “Really?” he asked in a hoarse, skeptical voice.

  Jonathan shook his head. He was in an old laboratory. The shelves were laden with test tubes, bottles of different colored fluids, and fleshy specimens of long-dead animals floating in jars of yellowish liquid. And then there was the old man himself: overweight and droopy-eyed, wrapped in a stained lab coat and tapping long, gray fingers on the arms of an enormous oak swivel chair. The scene would have been almost comical had it not been for the thing in the center of the room: a narrow flat slab that looked uncomfortably like an operating table.

  “Hmm,” the old man said. “Are you sure about that?”

  Nervous sweat collected under Jonathan’s arms and dripped down his back, but he maintained an impassive expression. “You can’t make me.”

  Rather than seem annoyed, the old man looked as if Jonathan’s refusal gave him only the deepest of pleasures—as if he admired Jonathan’s rebellious spirit even as he knew rebellion on Jonathan’s part was pointless.

  “But Dr. Altide, you’re a scientist, are you not?”

  “Look, if it’s OK with you, I think you’d better let me go,” Jonathan said, ignoring the question. “You’re not going to get anything from me, and on top of that you’re only going to get yourself in trouble. As it stands now, I still don’t know who you are. I don’t know where I am. So if you let me go now, I won’t be able to find you. We can just call the whole thing a big mistake, a misunderstanding. And we can forget about it.”

  The old man’s grin grew wider. “You’re a funny man, Dr. Altide. Very humorous.”

  “I’m certainly not trying to be.”

  The old man’s smile lingered for a moment and then vanished, supplanted by a chilly scowl. “As a scientist, you look for evidence before making any conclusions, correct?”

  Jonathan pressed his lips together, saying nothing.

  “Yes, of course you do,” the old man continued. “And so let’s look at the evidence. You’re bound, are you not? You’re hidden in a place where no one can find you, I think you’ll agree. There’s no chance that anyone is going to come and rescue you. Perhaps you don’t agree, but let me assure you it’s true. So given those facts, wouldn’t you concur that it’s rather silly of you to refuse to cooperate?”

  Jonathan shook his head.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan said emphatically, “that’s so.”

  “In case I’m not being perfectly clear, let me simplify things: I have complete control over you. Complete.”

  “Control over my body perhaps. But that’s just temporary. And you certainly don’t control my mind.”

  The old man sighed, like a parent growing weary of a child’s back talk. “I think there’s something you don’t fully understand. No one knows you exist, Dr. Altide. In fact, to be perfectly precise: you don’t exist.” The old man paused, waiting for the last three words to sink in.

  “I’m not sure how to react to a statement that’s obviously absurd.”

  “So you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about?”

  “I think you’re trying to intimidate me, but it’s not working.”

  “I’m merely stating fact.”

  “I see,” Jonathan said, but in such a way that it was obvious he didn’t see.

  “Hmm.” The old man made a sound like two rusty gears grinding together. “I think I’ve failed to inform you fully. It’s unfair of me to expect you to draw conclusions—the correct conclusions—without giving you all the evidence, don’t you agree?”

  Jonathan remained silent.

  The old man shuffled through a jumble of papers on his desk. “Here it is,” he said, pulling out something small. As he held it in the air, Jonathan could see it was a photograph.

  “Recognize them?” the old man asked.

  Jonathan shook his head.

  “Step closer.”

  Jonathan moved slightly closer. He could make out the image of a woman—a pregnant woman—standing near a man.

  “Now do you recognize them?”

  Jonathan shook his head, even as he had a feeling that the two people looked familiar. Without being aware of it, he took another two steps toward the man’s desk. The image was now crystal clear, strangely so.

  “My parents,” Jonathan whispered. He’d never seen this particular picture. The few images he had of his mother as a younger woman showed her at special occasions: as a little girl at her brother’s bar mitzvah; at her wedding; at Jonathan’s graduation from college. This picture was candid, in profile, almost as if she didn’t know the photo was being taken. “Where did you get that?”

  The old man ignored the question. “Do you know with whom she’s pregnant?”

  Jonathan shook his head slowly. “Me maybe?” he asked.

  “Very good, very good.”

  “But where’d you get it? And why?”

  “My assistant took it. You met him. He was one of the gentlemen who brought you here.”

  “Gentlemen? Hardly. But that’s ridiculous. Those guys are younger than me. And my father’s been dead for 20 years.”

  “Exactly,” the old man said. He was grinning again.

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what game you’re playing but enough is enough.”

  “Relax, Dr. Altide. Relax. I’m sure if you think just a bit more, you’ll be able to figure out what’s going on. You’re precisely right that Jaxon is younger than you. But you’re wrong if you think your father died 20 years ago. He didn’t. He hasn’t.” The old man paused for effect. “Yet.”

  Jonathan understood. It was as if he were waking from a dream, and confronting a grim, unwelcome reality. “Are you saying…” Jonathan started and then stopped.

  The old man, an eyebrow raised, waited expectantly. “Yes?” he prompted.

  “Are you saying your assistant traveled back—back in time—to take this picture?”

  The old man laughed. “No, no. Not at all. You misunderstand,” the old man said. Jonathan felt instant relief, albeit a peculiar kind. After all, he was still cuffed and being held against his will (although he couldn’t overcome the feeling that the whole thing was an elaborate joke—or, at the least, the work of buffoons who would eventually turn chicken and let him go). No, his relief was more metaphysical. For a moment, he’d thought that this crazy old man had dev
eloped the capacity to travel in time—creating the very technology that Jonathan himself had spent years pursuing.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Jonathan said.

  The old man was beaming, as if Jonathan’s words gave him tremendous pleasure. “Don’t feel bad, Dr. Altide. You really weren’t far off at all. You see, my assistant didn’t have to travel back in time to take that picture.” He waited for a moment before finishing his thought: “Because your mother lives just across town with your father and your sister.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve brought you, Dr. Altide, back to 1965, a month before you were born.”

  Jonathan wouldn’t have believed the old man had it not been for the picture, which gave him pause. “You’re crazy,” Jonathan spat angrily, trying to stay ahead of his desperation. If this was 1965, then the chance of his being rescued was slim and the chance of his returning to the future on his own even slimmer. Even as part of his mind grappled with the various implications—all horrifying—of his predicament, another part focused on the conversation at hand.

  “But why bring me here? Just so I can help you do what exactly? You obviously already have the technology you’re seeking.”

  “Unfortunately, our knowledge is limited. We can’t sustain long jumps, for instance. Nor can we take multiple trips. It took me nearly a year to calibrate my instruments so that they would take my men to 2005. Fortunately, you had this in your possession.” The old man opened a drawer and pulled out The Evolution of Physics.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The book’s spine has a homing device, one that helped us track you to a specific time and place.”

  Jonathan was stunned. “A homing device? But how? Who put it there?”

  “I did, of course,” the man said matter-of-factly.

  “But how…?” Jonathan’s voice trailed off. He had so many questions he didn’t know where to begin. “Why me?”