At last, I took a deep breath, vainly trying to quiet my heart. “Yes,” I said weakly, still clutching my blankets, still facing away from him with my eyes screwed shut. “Yes, I’m here.”
Ages seemed to pass while I waited for Roger to speak again. I could hear him on the edge of his bed, the box springs squeaking under him. I wondered how many others around the world were having the same experience that we were right now. I wondered how they were taking it.
“Jennifer,” Roger said at last, “let me see you.”
And slowly, somehow, I felt myself unfurling, turning toward him, responding instinctively to his voice like a plant responds to the sun or moisture or gravity. I sat up on my own bed, facing him, and then at last I opened my eyes.
For a long time, we just sat there, separated by a short gulf, and looked at each other. But after a while, looking didn’t seem like enough.
Roger crossed over from his world to mine the first time that morning. Later, I crossed over to see what his side looked and felt like. We learned later that most people didn’t do that—at least, not right away, not until they knew it was safe.
The geometry of the Collision was something I never really understood. Almost every space suddenly had a double. It was still possible to travel in all the usual directions—north, south, east, west, up, down—but it was as if a new direction and a new dimension had been added.
At every moment, each of us could step from any physical location in one world to the corresponding physical location in the other. You could go “out” and others could come “in.”
A lot of people were worried about what this would mean. Whether it meant that one world would obliterate the other, or people might get trapped on the “wrong” side if the worlds suddenly separated. Or if this meant we’d end up with one world with two versions of almost everything, all squished together.
But Roger and I didn’t really care about any of those questions. We were too busy finding out that we were in love.
A couple months later, I took Roger to visit my parents. We drove three hours to Pennsylvania, carrying a bottle of wine with us. My parents insisted on ignoring the fact that Roger had come from the next world over—my mother simply hovered nervously, fetching cheese trays and lemonade, while my father made bland small talk about whatever he thought would be a safe topic.
All around my parents’ house, they had pinned up long rows of bedsheets. Anywhere that the other world might peek through, they had hung sheets and blankets as privacy curtains. Whether they were hung from this side or that side—I couldn’t tell. For some reason, it made me furious.
I was alone in the kitchen with my mother when I demanded, “Don’t you even know who’s over there?” I could hear my father talking calmly about the blizzard of ’61 in the next room, which he must have figured was long enough ago to be “safe.”
“Jennifer!” said my mother, white and shaking. She was suddenly angrier than I was. “We don’t talk about that here.”
Later, as I was putting on my shoes to leave, I heard a laugh come from the other side of one of the sheets. Lifting a corner, I peeked under. In a room that looked remarkably like my parents’ living room, I saw my father—or a version of my father—sitting on the sofa with his arm around a woman.
But the woman—something was wrong with her. No matter how I scanned her features, I couldn’t make that woman fit into the form of my mother.
Both of the people on the other side glared at me. Even as I let the sheet fall with a mumbled apology, my blood turned icy in my veins.
I suddenly understood my mother’s fury. I was furious, too—as irrational as that was. Obviously, something had happened—in that other world, something was different with my parents. They had divorced, or my mother had died, or they had never met. And there, on the other side of all those sheets and blankets was that other life—probably neither happier nor sadder than this one, just different—and it was getting closer. Every hour, every day, as the Collision progressed, those other people were pushing into my parents’ rooms and their lives. Soon there might be no way to keep them out.
That night, at the motel, there was nobody renting the room on the other side. I told Roger I wanted to be alone, and I went to sleep on the bed in the other universe.
It was cold and empty, but at least it didn’t crowd me.
As space grew tighter, objects from each world started to meld together. It started with the biggest ones first. Where there had been twice as many skyscrapers on the skyline, there were once again the usual number. The duplicates had vanished, pushed together into single buildings occupying more or less the same space they had originally.
The same happened for houses and stores and restaurants. Where there were differences, the result was a combination of the two—a little from this world, and a little from that. It was unnerving, and often the slightness of the changes made them more so. Many times I stood looking at a building or holding an object in my hand, trying to figure out if it really had changed, or if I had just imagined it.
Even the furniture in our fast-shrinking apartment had become a hodgepodge. The dresser was mine, but it had the knobs from Roger’s. The desk was his, but my initials were carved in the bottom of one of the drawers. The books on our bookcase became weird entanglements of two stories told at once. I tried to read a few, but nothing made sense and I was left with unpleasant headaches.
“Water finds its level,” said the scientists. I don’t know exactly what that meant. I don’t know if anybody did. But it became a soothing motto nonetheless. Whenever we saw something changed—something old that had been carelessly mashed together with something new and different, we would nod and say, “Water finds its level.”
I guess it was supposed to make it seem natural. It was meant to suggest that this was somehow a return to order, or the result of some natural process. A flood might be violent while it happened, but once the water found its level, the torrent was replaced with a peaceful lake.
It was also meant, I suspect, to keep us from thinking too much about what would happen to the people.
There was no other version of me in Roger’s universe. Eventually I asked him, and he told me that he had looked but never found one. It seemed clear enough—whatever had changed about my parents had also erased me. I didn’t ask for details, didn’t want to know. Whether I had died somehow or had just never existed, I didn’t want to know.
Roger never asked about himself. Maybe he did his own research on his visits here—before all the phone books and Internet databases got entangled. Maybe he just knew. Either way, I didn’t tell him about the other version of him that I had found. I even knew where he worked: in a restaurant across town.
I had tried to forget about his whole existence, and mostly I succeeded. Another Roger, only twenty miles away. It made me sick somehow. I was sorry that I had ever looked.
But eventually, I went. Once everything started to meld together, I had to.
Once there, I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my car and just sat in the parking lot, staring at the restaurant.
Hours passed. I lost track of how many times I swore to myself that I would leave. Then, at last, the other Roger came out in a cook’s smock, chatting and sharing cigarettes with a waitress.
I went numb as I watched him. He was the same, but not. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to get to know him. I didn’t want to find out if I liked kissing him.
He had long hair. He smoked. He worked as a cook. It sounds superficial, but that wasn’t the Roger I knew. I might not have cared about any of those things if I had met this Roger first. But that wasn’t how things had worked out. Somewhere, back in his life, he had made different choices from the Roger I knew. He had different priorities.
But more importantly, my Roger was the one who had talked to me all those nights. This person, no matter how good the copy, hadn’t done any of that. That shared history had shaped some small part of my Roger—we had lau
ghed together, cried together, discovered things together. None of that could be replaced, not even by this identical twin.
There were countless programs on TV about people who had melded, or who were about to meld, or who wanted to meld. They all talked about feeling a strong pull, a desire, a need. And after their melding, they said it was the best thing that ever happened to them. How some imaginary hole in their being seemed to be filled. I just kept thinking that’s what people used to say about falling in love, but they made it sound like melding was even better than that.
Whenever the subject came up, Roger and I would just argue. So we stopped talking about it, but it would come up anyway, in secret and infuriating ways.
“Would you still love me …” Roger would say.
“Shut up,” I would say.
Eventually, I had to ask him. I blew up and asked him if he had ever wanted to be a cook, if he had ever had long hair, if he had ever tried a cigarette, if he had a thing for scuzzy waitresses with dyed hair and too much eye makeup. I didn’t tell him why I was asking, but he knew.
“Yeah,” he said, “I used to want to be a chef. I thought about going to culinary school.”
After that, I had to wonder. Which Roger had made the good decisions and which one had made the bad decisions? Which of the Rogers, if they compared lives, would be the happier one?
There were videos of people melding all over the Internet if you knew where to look for them. If you wanted to look for them. I didn’t like them—the insides and outsides, the flesh and skin, merging and oozing together. Things wriggling and writhing, skin splitting and sealing. They made me lightheaded. I hated them.
The time when Roger was away for three days without calling, they were all that I watched.
I recognized Roger immediately when he came back. I recognized both of them. He stood there in the hallway outside the apartment, a kind of hangdog expression on his face as he looked out from under his new long stringy hair through his old watery blue eyes.
He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t say anything. He knew how I felt, but I guess he wondered the same things I did, about which Roger had made the right choices. This was just another thing that never should have surprised me. Water finds its level.
As he stood there, his whole body was a question. Through my pain and fury and sorrow, I could see what he was asking. Could I find enough of the Roger I loved to let him stay with me? Could I find enough of him in there to try again? New and different were frightening, he seemed to say, but they can be exciting, too. Would I try this next experience with him? Could we discover this together too?
With tears trembling in my lashes and my heart slowly tearing apart, I let him in.
Later, when people asked what happened to Roger and me, I always told them the truth. “He melded in the Collision,” I’d say. “But I didn’t.”
And then they’d give me that knowing, sympathetic look. They had all been there, from one side or another—with spouses or parents or children or friends. We don’t say that water finds its level anymore. I haven’t heard anybody say that in years.
Now we just shrug and say, “Everybody changes.”
Everybody changes, and all we can do is accept it and move on. Everybody finds their other self, and they have that better-than-love melding experience, and suddenly they see everything twice as clearly and they know twice as many answers and priorities change overnight.
And suddenly you’re on the other end of that double-clear stare, and you realize it’s quiet, patient pity in those pale blue eyes. You realize they’re thinking that you can’t ever understand life like they do. You realize that they’re sorry there’s just no vocabulary to tell you what it means to have walked in two different pairs of shoes.
Yeah, everybody changes. Except those of us who don’t.
© 2013 by M. Bennardo.
M. Bennardo’s short stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Stupefying Stories, and others. He is also co-editor of This Is How You Die, a science-fiction anthology coming from Grand Central Publishing in July 2013. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, but people everywhere can find him online at mbennardo.com.
Interview: On Any Given Day
Maureen F. McHugh
(Pullout quote at top of site.)
EMMA: I had this virus, and it was inside me, and it could have been causing all these weird kinds of cancers—
INTERVIEWER: What kind of cancers?
EMMA: All sorts of weird stuff I’d never heard of, like hairy cell leukemia, and cancerous lesions in parts of your bones, and cancer in your pancreas. But I wasn’t sick. I mean, I didn’t feel sick. And now, even after all the antivirals, now I worry about it all the time. Now I’m always thinking I’m sick. It’s like something was stolen from me that I never knew I had.
(The following is a transcript from an interview for the On Any Given Day presentation of 4.12.2021. This transcript does not represent the full presentation, and more interviews and information are present on the site. On Any Given Day is made possible by the National Public Internet, by NPIBoston.org affiliate, and by a grant from the Carrol-Johnson Charitable Family Trust. For information on how to purchase this or any other full site presentation on CDM, please check NPIBoston.org.)
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Pop-up quotes and site notes in the interview are included with this transcript.
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The following interview was conducted with Emma Chicheck. In the summer of 2018, a fifteen-year-old student came into a health clinic in the suburban town of Charlotte, outside Cleveland, Ohio, with a sexually transmitted version of a proto-virus called pv414, which had recently been identified as a result of contaminated batches of genetic material associated with the telemerase therapy used in rejuvenation. The virus had only been seen previously in rejuvenated elders, and the presence of the virus in teenagers was at first seen as possible evidence that the virus had changed vectors. The medical detective work done to trace the virus, and the picture of teenage behavior that emerged was the basis of the site documentary, called “The Abandoned Children.” Emma was one of the students identified with the virus.
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The site map provides links to a description of the proto-virus, a map of the transmission of the virus from Terry Sydnowski through three girls to a total of eleven other people, and interviews with state health officials.
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EMMA: I was fourteen when I lost my virginity. I was drunk, and there was this guy named Luis, he was giving me these drinks that tasted like melon, this green stuff that everybody was drinking when they could get it. He said he really liked all my Egyptian stuff and he kept playing with my slave bracelet. The bracelet has chains that go to rings you wear on your thumb, your middle finger, and your ring finger. “Can you be my slave?” he kept asking and at first I thought that was funny because he was the one bringing me drinks, you know? But we kept kissing and then we went into the bedroom and he felt my breasts and then he wanted to have sex. I felt as if I’d led him on, you know? So I didn’t say no.
I saw him again a couple of times after that, but he didn’t pay much attention to me. He was older and he didn’t go to my school. I regret it. I wish it had been a little more special and I was really too young.
Sometimes I thought that if I were a boy I’d be one of those boys who goes into school one day and starts shooting people.
(Music—“Poor Little Rich Girl” by Tony Bennett.)
INTERVIEWER: What’s a culture freak?
EMMA: You’re kidding, right? This is for the interview? Okay, in my own words: A culture freak is a person who really likes other cultures, and listens to culture freak bands and doesn’t conform to the usual sort of jumpsuit or Louis Vuitton wardrobe thing. So I’m into Egyptian a lot, in a spiritual way, too. I tell Tarot Cards. They’re really Egyptian, people think they’re Gypsy but I read about how they’re actually way older than that and I have an Egyptian deck. My friend Lindsey is like me, bu
t my other friend, Denise, is more into Indian stuff. Lindsey and I like Indian, too, and sometimes we’ll all henna our hands.
INTERVIEWER: Do you listen to culture freak music?
EMMA: I like a lot of music, not just culture music. I like Black Helicopters, I really like their New World Order CDM, because it’s really retro and paranoid. I like some of the stuff my mom and dad like, too; Tupac and Lauryn Hill. I like the band Shondonay Shaka Zulu. It’s got a lot of drone. I like that.
(Music—“My Favorite Things” by John Coltrane.)
I’m seventeen. I’ll be eighteen in April. I went to kindergarten when I was only four. I’ve already been accepted at Northeastern. I wanted to go to Barnard but my parents said they didn’t want me going to school in New York City.
My dad’s in telecommunications. He’s in Hong Kong for six weeks. He’s trying to get funding for a sweep satellite. They’re really cool. The satellites are really small, but they have this huge, like, net in front of them, like miles in front and miles across. The net, like, spins itself. See, if space debris hits something hard it will drill right through it, but when it hits this big net, the net gives and just lets the chunk of metal or whatever slide away so it doesn’t hit the satellite. That way it won’t be like that satellite in ’07 that caused the chain reaction so half the United States couldn’t use their phones.
My mom is a teacher. She’s taking a night class two nights a week to recertify. She’s always having to take classes, and she’s always gone one night a week for that. Then there’s after school stuff. She never gets home before six. When I was little, she took summers off, but now she does bookkeeping and office work in the summer for a landscaper, because my older brother and sister are in college already.
The landscaper is one of those baby boomers on rejuvenation. He’s a pain in the ass. Like my dad says, they’re all so selfish. Why won’t they let anyone else have a life? I mean, the sixties are over, and they’re trying to have them all over again. I hate when we’re out and we see a bunch of baby boomers all hopped up on hormones acting like teenagers. But then they go back and go to work and won’t let people like my dad get promoted because they won’t retire.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36 Page 21
