by Adam Roberts
In other words, the only alteration in all these alternate realities was: me.
My stay in any given reality lasted seventy hours. At the end of that time I was enveloped in gleaming folds of violet light. This portion of my experience was unfalteringly the same, whatever else changed. From nowhere the light would flourish and bubble up around me, and then it would disappear. I would be in the same place I’d been in a moment before, surrounded by the same buildings the same memories in my head; but people no longer knew me. I might have been speaking to them immediately before the violet fire. It didn’t matter. Afterwards I was a stranger. If I had accumulated any official record in my seventy-hour sojourn, as on occasion I did, then after the regular fire it was erased as if I had never existed in that place - as, in fact, I never had.
I don’t flatter myself when I say that I caught on quickly enough. Sometimes I appeared in the middle of people to whom I must have beamed out of nowhere; but they always blinked, and looked startled, and said things like, ‘Where did you pop up from?’ and assume I’d somehow crept up on them. Usually nobody was there when I arrived. The people I’d been talking to in Reality Ante would rarely be gathered in that same place in Reality Post, since in this new reality I didn’t exist for them to talk to.
My first night in the reality which (I suppose) lay precisely adjacent to my ‘home’ reality was miserable and cold and I awoke disoriented, hungry and a little hung-over. A night on the tiles. An uncomfortable sleep under the cold stars. I took my lead from the other vagrants, followed them to an as-yet unopened Supermarket and round the back to sift through the large bins of stale bread and sell-by-expired vegetables. It was good stuff, actually. ‘Watch out for Michelle,’ I was advised. ‘She’s a dragon.’ And then a car pulled into the deserted car-park and an individual in Sainsbury livery, Michelle herself, clambered out, yelling at us all to clear off. We scattered.
I wandered through the shut-up town, passing commuters on their way to the station and shop workers shuffling reluctantly into work bearing coffee in cardboard receptacles like Olympic torches. Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking that I had gotten drunker yesterday than I realised, and that this in some way accounted for the day’s dislocations. So I went back to my flat, thinking vaguely of having a shower and writing off the night as an alcohol-prompted adventure in slumming. But on my street I once again saw red-haired Roderick, this time accompanied by an angular, beaky woman (his girlfriend, I would discover), coming out of the building’s main door together, dressed in overcoats. They kissed at the gate and went separate ways. After they had gone I went up to the flat, but they had changed the locks, following the previous day. Quick work on their part.
So instead I cut across town and intercepted Susan on her way into work, to remonstrate with her - to get her to drop the charade, or at the least clue me in on what was happening. I suppose she recognised me from before, because she was instantly on her guard.
‘Just tell me why you’re pretending not to know me!’ I cried, the nitro of frustration mixing with the glycerine of bewilderment. I was, I daresay, more aggressive than was advisable. That was when she got the Mace from her handbag and struggled with the lid. That was when I marched away, telling myself I was going in disgust, although the emotion was much closer to terror.
I wandered aimlessly for a time. Flâneur. I abluted in the Starbucks toilet, emerging to some disapproving frowns from the queue of people waiting to come in after me. I ducked into a nearby pub, where I spent the last of my ready cash on a couple of drinks. That made things seem more manageable, though seem is not the same as be. I decided the thing to do was to notify the authorities and let them sort the whole mess out.
So my afternoon was spent in the pokey atrium of the local police station. I explained myself to the desk sergeant, and, after an hour’s wait, to a more senior policeman, neither of whom knew what to make of me. I gave them my details - date of birth, national insurance - and they patiently fed data into their computer and then they patiently explained that these numbers had no correlation with reality. With my consent they took me into the body of the station, made little oval woodcut-prints of my fingertips and swabbed the inside of my cheek. Come back next week, they advised. Till then, here’s the address of a homeless charity. Of course I never went back, because a week later I was two realities away. But it wasn’t the specifics, the practical things - it was the mood. All the policemen and policewomen with whom I came in contact treated me in the same way: courteously but distantly. Their manner was professionally disengaged, and it left me feeling decontextualised. They treated me like a nonperson.
Now, now, the truth of course is that a non-person is precisely what I was. Still!
At that time, though, my emotion was one of anger. The more I thought about it, the crosser I became. I had been brushed off. I was facing another night sleeping amongst the strewn cardboard and the transparent giant seaweed of bubble-wrap sheets. So I resolved, short-sightedly I concede, to force myself on the attention of the police. I walked into a hardware store just as it was closing - ‘I’m sorry we’re closing’ said the old geezer behind the till in a singsong voice. But I snatched a Sabatier blade from the shop’s display, and rushed at him singing-out ‘Aaa!’ in a high-pitched voice, and when he stumbled backwards yelping and fell on his arse I tried to open the till so as to grab some money. It wouldn’t open, no matter which buttons I pressed.
The old man was saying, ‘Let’s be calm, let’s calm down’ over and again, like an automaton. It occurred to me that I needed him to insert his staff card to get the till open, and brandishing the knife (feeling absurdly self-conscious as I did so) I ordered him to do this. He got gingerly to his feet, and fumbled out a credit card-sized object. It was attached to his belt by a helix-wound plastic cord.
‘Let’s stay calm,’ he said, trembly-handedly and speaking in a thoroughly uncalm voice. ‘I’m doing it now. I’m doing it.’ I tried waving the knife at him, the gesture looked more stupid than intimidating. So I held it with my hand over the handle, and jabbed the point in his direction. I was clumsy, the end knocked the side of the metal till and the weapon jolted free of my grip. I swore as it chimed on the floor tiles. But I was down to retrieve it and back up in no time. It still had its cardboard wrapper sheathing its edge, which I thought diminished its scare-value. I ripped this free. My heart was chuntering along at a fair old lick, I don’t mind telling you. The old man had the till open now, and I grabbed a bundle of notes. Then, feeling not in the least like Jesse James, I suddenly bolted, dropping the knife and running at full pelt through the open door. I ran and ran through the shopping precinct as adrenaline flushed through me, laughing aloud; ran through the river gardens and along the barge-way to the Old Bridge. Only then, gasping and puffing, did I stop. Only then, indeed, did the idiotically impulsive nature of what I had done come home to me. I had left the knife on the floor of the shop, doubtless covered all over with my fingerprints. I had that very afternoon left copies of those fingerprints in the local police station. This was not clever.
Still, at least I now had some cash: a little under £500, when I counted it. So I hailed a taxi, and went to the edge of town, along the causeway and past the industrial estate - it felt, somehow, safer there than in the centre. There I booked in to a Premier Inn. I went up to my room, showered, drank the mini-bar dry, and sat on the bed watching television. I tried and failed to make sense of things, although the hooligan excitement of earlier had at least settled into a calmer state of being. There was still no reception on my mobile, but I could still access its phonebook, so I used the hotel phone to call a number of friends and acquaintances. Or to be precise: I started out doing that, but after the tenth or twelfth repetition of ‘Who is this?’, ‘I’ve never heard of you’ and, ‘How did you get my number?’ I grew demoralised and gave up. I tried calling the number for my father, in Canada, but it didn’t ring.
Finally I fell asleep, and woke next mo
rning with a sense of dread, certain that the police would be waiting at the breakfast bar to arrest me. But there was nobody there. So I ate, and read the papers, and lolled about in my room. It occurred to me to go about the town some more - to go, for instance to my workplace - and look deeper into the strange situation I found myself in. But after what I had done the day before, it seemed to me more sensible to lie low. And low is where I lay. When the maid came to clean the room, I took myself to the lobby bar and had a glass of wine, staring through the sheet glass at the comings and goings of men in suits and women in suits, clambering into or levering themselves out of company cars and taxis on the tarmac apron. Then I went back upstairs, and took an afternoon nap.
That evening I watched Memento on cable movies, and wondered if it were a serendipitous clue to my circumstance. That man lost his memory on a regular loop, erasing everything new he had just learned. I seemed to be in a kind of inverse equivalent; that everybody else lost their memory. But not their whole memory; just their memory of me. That was crazy. Then I wondered if, in some curious way, it might seem to an amnesiac that he could still remember but everybody else had forgotten - in the same way that it might seem to a madman that he was sane and everybody else mad. But I couldn’t get that version of events to add up in my head, so I let it go. I was a little drunk by this stage. So I watched some porn, and cracked one off, and took a long, hot bath at midnight, and finally fell asleep in my dressing gown.
The next morning I decided to venture out. For a while I walked up and down the causeway not meaning to go anywhere, but simply to stretch my legs. The sky was completely covered by froth-coloured low cloud. Three industrial chimneys stood as the bases for three tapering table legs of white. It looked as if the whole sky had been filled up with the white smoke of industry.
After a while, made mildly reckless by boredom, I walked properly into town. Nobody noticed me. I ate in McDonald’s, and coming out I experienced the violet-coloured fire, flaring all about me for a second time.
The light came over me, and went away, and I felt no different than I had before. It was a puzzle, and of course I wondered about its precise connection with what was going on. But my first assumption was that it was some kind of disorder in my eye, like a detaching retina, or perhaps some kind of schizophrenic side-effect in my brain chemistry. At any rate, I was compos mentis enough to want to cover my tracks a little after the criminal offence I had committed the previous day. I slunk into the centre of town, expecting to see wanted posters everywhere, but of course there was nothing. I decided to alter my appearance. Wanting to husband my money (for I did not relish robbing a shop of get some more) I bought a new set of clothes from a Charity Shop: a leather jacket, a pair of plastic sunglasses and a woollen cap in which my head nestled as tightly as an acorn in its cup. Then I walked back to the hotel.
I don’t know what I thought. Perhaps I thought everything would snap back to normal of its own accord. Maybe I thought I was dreaming, or that I’d slipped into a coma, or something like that. I don’t know what I thought. I wandered back to the hotel, as the clouds overhead darkened and purpled.
Back at the hotel nobody knew me. There was no booking in my name. ‘I gave you a deposit,’ I said, loudly. ‘Cash!’ I was conscious that such of my stolen money as I still had would not last me very long.
‘I’m afraid our records show . . .’ said the bland female behind the desk.
‘I spoke to you this morning! I had a glass of wine and sat in that chair,’ I said, pointing, as if the specificity of the chair might jog her memory.
‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken, sir,’ she said.
‘But we talked weather!’ I insisted. ‘We talked likelihood of rain!’
‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken, sir,’ she repeated.
I believe there was some half-formed notion in my head that the hotel staff had been fooled by my change of clothes. But of course it wasn’t that, and if I could have stilled the furious bluster and resentment in my head I’d have realised the truth. But the fact that this bullshit had been going on for days now stoked me. I swore at her. She stepped back from the counter, and a man in a uniform with green epaulettes and SECURITY on his lapel badge emerged from the depths of the building. ‘Oh don’t worry!’ I yelled, with infantile vehemence. ‘I’m going!’ I marched out, and climbed into one of the waiting taxis, and told the driver to take me to another hotel. He folded up his Sun with patient precision and informed me that I’d have to be more precise than that. I told him, hotly, to drive me to the next fucking town. He waited until my breathing wasn’t quite so loud, and then, without a word, he obliged me.
The drive took a quarter hour, during which time the clouds broke. The rainstorm came quickly, throwing innumerable plastic beads at the cab windows and down upon the roof for a while. In five minutes it was over. Afterwards sky and land blued. The land was heavier after the storm than before. ‘Here,’ I called, as he approached a Holiday Inn on the urban outskirts.
I tell you what I’d discovered: three days is plenty long enough to get used to the idea that one’s life has completely changed. I resolved to leave my old life behind. At the edge of my mind was the consciousness that the police must have my fingerprints, and would be looking for me. But, I told myself, I don’t exist! I’m not on their records. I don’t exist.
Nevertheless, and for reasons I don’t quite comprehend, the next three days were shaped by a profound anxiety. At the Holiday Inn I paid three nights’ stay in advance, which took pretty much all my remaining monies. Still, for a few days I eked my way. I struck up a friendship with a group of corporate types, who were staying in the hotel for a marketing convention: three men and one woman. They were in the grooming products business, they told me. ‘You know what?’ said the oldest of them, a large fellow called Julian with broad blue jowls and the flesh about his eyes all crumpled and creased into a hundred petalic folds. ‘It’s the easiest game in the world. You buy standard emollient at ten pound the hundred-weight; add in a few quid o’ scent and sell it in tiny little squeezy tubes at £8.99 a pop.’
‘It’s all in the marketing,’ said Michelle, the woman. ‘And that’s where we come in. It’s never the product, it’s always the marketing.’ Cream on skin.
‘So,’ I said, drunk - yes - but also heady with the existential licence of having simply left my old life entirely behind. ‘So, it’s a fraud?’
They all four made big dumb-shows of outrage and astonishment, interspersed with knowing laughter, boomed ‘No! No!’ and ordered another round of drinks ‘and find out what our cynical friend is having’.
On the sixth day I woke feeling that the man who had stepped, on impulse, into the hardware store and robbed it at knifepoint was a different man to me. That wasn’t the sort of thing I did. It was the sort of thing others did. Despite watching the TV news assiduously, and reading all the local papers the hotel carried, I saw no reference to the crime. This did not surprise me, for surely it was a trivial thing in the larger scheme of good and evil. But every moment in that Holiday Inn fizzed with low-level fear. Every time I came down in the morning for breakfast I wondered if the police would be waiting for me in the lobby. Every other human being who so much as looked at me did so, in my mind, because they recognised me for the criminal I was. I can’t say it was a comfortable three days. But I’ll say this: I remember it all vividly, and that vividness is itself a kind of joy. I’ve stayed in many more luxurious places since, and lived completely free from that sort of anxiety, yet those moments pass through me and leave almost no trace upon my mind. I suppose there is more of the now in grief than in happiness.
At any rate, when the violet-coloured fire flared up around me for the third time, at noon on the Saturday - and, more to the point, when the barman I had been speaking with at exactly that moment acted as if he had never seen me before - as if I had crept into the room like a ninja and suddenly leapt up in front of the bar - the penny began to drop. I
was standing in an almost deserted hotel bar, and the barman was in the process of drawing me a pint of lager. Then there was the bright pale-mauve fire all about me, and when it withdrew there was no pint in front of me, and the barman had never seen me before.
It’s a strange and antiquated phrase, isn’t it? About the penny dropping I mean. Still, that is the direction in which the coin moved. At the main desk I discovered that the pretty brunette, with whom I had been on first-name terms that morning, didn’t know who I was. I discovered there was no booking in my name, and that hotel was full for the weekend. It dawned on me then.
I put two and two together and arrived at - freedom, I suppose. Julian, Michelle and the other came down in a lift, and walked through the lobby past me without giving me so much as a second glance. ‘Julian!’ I called out, not expecting him to recognise me, and indeed precisely to check that he didn’t. He looked round. He didn’t speak, but his face said do I know you? So I bounded over to him, ‘Julian! Julian!’, and I fed him some of the details I had learned about him from the few days socialising - his employer, his wife’s name, his kids - and genuine puzzlement afflicted his face like a sort of depression.
