AMPOULES REMAINING: 32 There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being—a mannequin or humanlike robot—it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.
It’s a similar psychological effect as I walk the streets of this Chicago that’s almost mine. I would take an apocalyptic nightmare any day.
Crumbled buildings and gray wasteland don’t hold a candle to standing on a corner I’ve passed a thousand times and realizing that the street names are wrong. Or the coffee place where I always stop to grab my morning triple- shot Americano with soy is a boutique wine shop instead. Or my house at 44 Eleanor Street is a brownstone inhabited by strangers.
—
This is the fourth Chicago we’ve connected to since escaping that world of sickness and death. Each has been like this one—almost home.
Night is imminent, and since we’ve taken four hits of the drug in fairly rapid succession with no recovery period, we decide for the first time not to return to the box.
It’s the same hotel in Logan Square where I stayed in Amanda’s world.
The neon sign is red instead of green but the name is the same—HOTEL ROYALE—and it’s just as quirky, just as frozen in time, but in a thousand insignificantly different ways.
Our room has two double beds, and just like the last room I had here, it looks out onto the street.
I set our plastic bags containing toiletries and thrift-store clothes on the dresser beside the television.
Any other time, I might have balked at this dated room that smells like cleaning product failing to cover up mildew and worse.
Tonight it feels like luxury.
Pulling off my hoodie and undershirt, I say, “I’m too gross to even have
an opinion about this place.”
I toss them into the waste bin.
Amanda laughs. “You don’t want to get into a who’s-more-disgusting competition with me.”
“I’m surprised they rented us a room at any price.”
“That might tell you something about the quality of establishment we’re
dealing with.”
I go to the window, part the curtains.
It’s early evening.
Raining.
The exterior hotel sign bleeds red neon light into the room.
I couldn’t begin to guess the day or date.
I say, “Bathroom’s all yours.”
Amanda grabs her things from the plastic bag.
Soon, I can hear the bright sound of running water echoing off the tile.
She calls out, “Oh my God, you have to take a bath, Jason! You have no idea!”
I’m too dirty to lie down on the bed, so I sit on the carpet next to the radiator, letting waves of heat wash over me and watching the sky darken through the window.
—
I take Amanda’s advice and draw a bath.
Condensation runs down the walls.
The heat works wonders on my lower back, which has been out for days from sleeping in the box.
As I shave my beard, the questions of identity keep haunting me.
There’s no Jason Dessen employed as a physics professor at Lakemont College or any of the local schools, but I can’t help wondering if I’m out
there somewhere.
In another city.
Another country.
Perhaps living under a different name, with a different woman, a different job.
If I am, if I spend my days under broken-down cars in a mechanic’s shop or drilling cavities instead of teaching physics to college students, am I still the same man at the most fundamental level?
And what is that level?
If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?
After an hour, I emerge, clean for the first time in days, wearing jeans, a plaid button-down, and an old pair of Timberlands. They’re a half size too big, but I’ve doubled up on wool socks to compensate.
Amanda studies me appraisingly, says, “Works.”
“Not so bad yourself.”
Her thrift-store score consists of black jeans, boots, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket that still reeks of the prior owner’s smoking habit.
She’s lying in bed, watching a TV show I don’t recognize.
She looks up at me. “Know what I’m thinking?”
“What?”
“Bottle of wine. Ridiculous amount of food. Every dessert on the menu. I mean, I haven’t been this skinny since college.”
“The multiverse diet.”
She laughs, and it’s a good thing to hear.
—
We walk for twenty minutes in the rain, because I want to see if one of my favorite restaurants exists in this world.
It does, and it’s like running into a friend in a foreign city.
This cozy, hipster place is a riff on an old Chicago neighborhood inn.
There’s a long wait for a table, so we stalk the bar until a pair of stools opens up, sliding in at the far end beside a rain-streaked window.
We order cocktails.
Then wine.
A thousand small plates that just keep coming.
We catch a hard, beautiful glow off the booze, and our conversation stays
very much in the moment.
How the food is.
How good it feels to be inside and warm.
Neither of us mentions the box even once.
Amanda says I look like a lumberjack.
I tell her she looks like a biker chick.
We both laugh too hard, too loud, but we need it.
As she gets up to go to the bathroom, she says, “You’ll be right here?”
“I will not move from this spot.”
But she keeps looking back.
I watch her walk down the bar and disappear around the corner.
On my own, the ordinariness of the moment is almost too much to stand.
I glance around the restaurant, taking in the faces of the waiters, the customers. Two dozen noisy conversations mixing into a kind of meaningless roar.
I think, What if you people knew what I knew?
—
The walk back is colder and wetter.
Near the hotel, I see the sign for my local bar, Village Tap, blinking
across the street.
I say, “Feel like a nightcap?”
It’s late enough that the bulk of the evening crowd has thinned out.
We grab seats at the bar, and I watch as the bartender finishes updating someone’s ticket at the touchscreen.
He finally turns and comes over, looks at Amanda first, then me.
It’s Matt. He has probably served me a thousand drinks in my lifetime.
He served me and Ryan Holder my last night in my world.
But there’s no hint of recognition.
Just blank, disinterested courtesy.
“What can I get you guys?”
Amanda orders a wine.
I ask for a beer.
As he pulls the tap, I lean over and whisper to Amanda, “I know the
bartender. He doesn’t recognize me.”
“What do you mean you know him?”
“This is my local bar.”
“No. It’s not. And of course he doesn’t recognize you. What’d you expect?”
“It’s just weird. This place looks exactly like it should.”
Matt brings our drinks over.
“Want to start a tab?”
I have no credit card, no identification, nothing but a roll of cash in the inner pocket of my Members Only jacket right next to our remaining ampoules.
“I’ll just settle up now.” As I reach for the money, I say, “I’m Jason, by
the way.”
“Matt.”
“I like this place. Yours?”
“Yep.”
He seems not to give a single fuck what I think of his bar, and it puts a sad, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. Amanda senses. When Matt leaves us, she lifts her wineglass and clinks it against my pint.
Says, “To a good meal, a warm bed, and not being dead yet.”
—
Back in the hotel room, we kill the lights and get undressed in the dark. I know I’ve lost all objectivity with regard to our accommodations, because the bed feels wonderful.
Amanda asks from her side of the room, “You locked the door?”
“I did.”
I close my eyes. I can hear the rain ticking against the window. The occasional car moving past on the wet street below.
“It was a nice night,” Amanda says.
“It was. I don’t miss the box, but it’s strange being away from it.”
“I don’t know about you, but my old world is feeling more and more like a ghost. You know how a dream feels the farther you get from it? It loses its color and intensity and logic. Your emotional connection to it fades.”
I ask, “You think you’d ever forget it entirely? Your world?”
“I don’t know. I could see it getting to the point where it didn’t feel real anymore. Because it isn’t. The only thing that’s real in this moment is this city. This room. This bed. You and me.”
—
In the middle of the night, I realize Amanda is beside me.
It’s nothing totally new. We’ve slept like this in the box many times.
Holding each other in darkness, as lost as two people have ever been.
The only difference now is that we’re wearing nothing but our underwear and her skin is distractingly soft against mine.
Shivers of neon light slip through the curtains.
Reaching over in the dark, she takes hold of my hand and puts it around
her.
Then she turns over, faces me.
“You’re a better man than he ever was.”
“Who?”
“The Jason I knew.”
“I hope so. Jesus.” I smile to flag the joke. She just stares at me with these midnight eyes. We’ve looked at each other a lot lately, but there’s something different in the way she’s looking at me now.
There’s a connection here, and it’s getting stronger every day.
If I moved even an inch closer in her direction, we would do this.
No question in my mind.
And if I did kiss her, if we slept together, maybe I’d feel guilty and regret it, or maybe I’d realize that she could make me happy.
Some version of me certainly kissed her in this moment.
Some version knows the answer.
But it won’t be me.
She says, “If you want me to go back over there, just say it.”
I say, “I don’t want you to, but I need you to.”
AMPOULES REMAINING: 24 Yesterday, I saw myself on the Lakemont campus in a world where Daniela had died—according to an obituary I found online at the public library—at thirty-three from brain cancer.
Today, it’s a gorgeous afternoon in a Chicago where Jason Dessen died two years ago in a car accident.
I step into an art gallery in Bucktown, trying not to look at the woman behind the counter, whose nose is in a book. Instead, I focus on the walls, which are covered in oil paintings whose subject appears to be exclusively
Lake Michigan.
In every season.
Every color.
Every time of day.
The woman says without looking up, “Let me know if there’s anything I
can help you with.”
“Are you the artist?”
She sets the book aside and steps out from behind the register.
Walks over.
It’s the closest I’ve been to Daniela since the night I helped her die. She’s stunning—form-fitting jeans and a black T-shirt splattered with acrylic paint.
“I am, yes. Daniela Vargas.”
She clearly doesn’t know me, doesn’t recognize me. I guess in this world,
we never met.
“Jason Dessen.”
She offers her hand, and I take it. It feels just like hers—rough and strong and adept—the hand of an artist. Paint is stuck to her fingernails. I can still
feel them running down my back.
“These are amazing,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“I love the focus on one subject.”
“I started painting the lake three years ago. It’s so different season to season.” She points to the one we’re standing in front of. “This was one of my first attempts. That’s from Juneway Beach in August. On clear days in late summer, the water turns this luminescent, greenish blue. Almost tropical.” She moves down the wall. “Then you get a day like this in October, all clouded over, and it paints the water gray. I love these because there’s almost no distinction between the water and the sky.”
“You have a favorite season?” I ask.
“Winter.”
“Really?”
“It’s the most diverse, and the sunrises are spectacular. When the lake froze over last year, those were some of my best paintings.”
“How do you work? En plein air, or—”
“From photographs mainly. I occasionally set up my easel on the shore in the summer, but I love my studio so much I rarely paint elsewhere.”
The conversation stalls.
She glances back at the register.
Wanting to get back to her book probably.
Having most likely made an appraisal of my faded, thrift-store jeans and hand-me-down button-down and realized I’m unlikely to buy anything.
“Is this your gallery?” I ask, though I know the answer.
Just wanting to hear her talk.
To make this moment last as long as it possibly can.
“It’s actually a co-op, but since my work is hanging this month, I’m on
deck to hold down the fort.”
She smiles.
Only politely.
Begins to drift away.
“If there’s anything else I can—”
“I just think you’re so talented.”
“Oh, that’s really nice of you to say. Thank you.”
“My wife is an artist.”
“Local?”
“Yep.”
“What’s her name?”
“It’s um, well, you probably wouldn’t know it, and we’re not really
together anymore, so…”
“Sorry to hear that.”
I reach down and touch the frayed thread that’s still, against all odds, tied around my ring finger.
“It’s not that we’re not together. It’s just…”
I don’t finish the thought, because I want her to ask me to finish it. To show a shred of interest, stop looking at me like a stranger, because we are
not strangers.
We’ve made a life together.
We have a son.
I’ve kissed every inch of your body.
I’ve cried with you and laughed with you.
How can something so powerful in one world not bleed through into this one?
I stare into Daniela’s eyes, but there’s no love or recognition or
familiarity coming back.
She just looks mildly uncomfortable.
Like she’s hoping I’ll leave.
“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” I ask.
She smiles.
Now severely uncomfortable.
“I mean after you get off, whenever that is.”
If she says yes, Amanda will kill me. I’m already late meeting her back at the hotel. We’re supposed to return to the box this afternoon.
But Daniela isn’t going to say yes.
She’s biting her lip like she always does when she’s nervous, no doubt trying to come up with some reason beyond a blanket, ego-destroying “no,” but I can see she’s drawing a blank, that she’s working up the nerve to drop the hammer on my foundering ass.
“You know what?” I say. “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’ve put you on the
spot.”
Fuck.
I’m dying.
It’s one thing to get shot down by a total stranger.
Another entirely to crash and burn with the mother of your child.
“I’m just going to go now.”
I head for the door.
She doesn’t try to stop me.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 16 Every Chicago we’ve stepped into this last week, the trees are looking more and more skeletal, their leaves stripped and rain-pasted to the pavement. I sit on the bench across the street from my brownstone, bundled up against the bitter morning cold in a thrift-store coat I bought yesterday for $12 with currency from another world. It smells like an old man’s closet—mothballs and analgesic cream.
Back at the hotel, I left Amanda scribbling away in a notebook of her own.
I lied, told her I was going out for a walk to clear my head and get a cup of coffee.
I see myself step out the front door and move quickly down the steps and onto the sidewalk, heading for the El station, where I’ll take the Purple Line
to the Lakemont campus in Evanston. I’m wearing noise-canceling headphones, probably listening to a podcast—some science lecture or an episode of This American Life.
It’s October 30 according to the front page of the Tribune, a little less than a month since the night I was taken at gunpoint and ripped out of my world.
Feels like I’ve been traveling in the box for years.
I don’t know how many Chicagos we’ve connected to so far.
They’re all beginning to blend.
This one is the closest yet, but it still isn’t mine. Charlie attends a charter school, and Daniela works out of the house as a graphic designer.
Sitting here, I realize I’ve always looked at Charlie’s birth and my choice to make a life with Daniela as the threshold event that caused the trajectory of our lives to swing away from success in our careers.
But that’s an oversimplification.
Yes, Jason2 walked away from Daniela and Charlie and subsequently had the breakthrough. But there are a million Jasons who walked away and didn’t invent the box.
Worlds where I left Daniela and our careers still amounted to nothing.
Or where I left and we both found moderate levels of success, but failed to set the world on fire.
And inversely, there are worlds where I stayed and we had Charlie, which branched into less-than-perfect timelines.
Where our relationship deteriorated.
Where I decided to leave our marriage.
Or Daniela did.
Or we struggled and suffered along in a loveless and broken state, toughing it out for the sake of our son.
If I represent the pinnacle of family success for all the Jason Dessens, Jason2 represents the professional and creative apex. We’re opposite poles of the same man, and I suppose it isn’t a coincidence that Jason2 sought out my life from the infinite possibilities available.
Though he’d experienced complete professional success, total fulfillment as a family man was as foreign to him as his life was to me.
It all points to the fact that my identity isn’t binary.
It’s multifaceted.
And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn’t just the inverse of who I am. It’s an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life between the extremes of me and Jason2.
Reaching into my pocket, I take out the prepaid mobile phone that cost $50, money that could have fed Amanda and me for a day, or put us up in a cheap motel for another night.
With my fingerless gloves, I uncrumple the torn-out sheet of yellow paper from the D section of the Chicago Metro phone book and dial the circled number.
There’s something horribly lonely about a place that’s almost home.
From where I sit, I can see the room on the second floor that I assume serves as Daniela’s in-home office. The blinds are open and she’s seated with her back to me, facing a giant monitor.
I see her lift a cordless handset and stare at the display.
Not recognizing the number.
Please answer.
She shelves the phone.
My voice: “You’ve reached the Dessens. We can’t take your call, but if
you—”
I hang up before the beep.
Call again.
This time, she picks up and answers before the second ring, “Hello?”
For a moment, I don’t say anything.
Because I can’t find my voice.
“Hello?”
“Hi.”
“Jason?”
“Yeah.”
“What number are you calling from?”
I suspected she would ask this right off the bat.
I say, “My phone’s dead, so I borrowed one off this woman on the train.”
“Is everything okay?”
“How’s your morning going?” I ask.
“Fine. I just saw you, silly.”
“I know.”
She spins around on the swivel chair at her desk, says, “So you just wanted to talk to me so badly that you borrowed a stranger’s phone?”
“I did, actually.”
“You’re sweet.”
I just sit there, absorbing her voice.
“Daniela?”
“Yes?”
“I really miss you.”
“What’s wrong, Jason?”
“Nothing.”
“You sound weird. Talk to me.”
“I was walking to the El, and it just hit me.”
“What did?”
“I take so many moments with you for granted. I walk out the door to work, and I’m already thinking about my day, about the lecture I have to give, whatever, and I just…I had a moment of clarity getting on the train about how much I love you. How much you mean to me. Because you
never know.”
“Never know what?”
“When it could all be taken away. Anyway, I tried to call you, but my phone was dead.”
For a long moment, there’s just silence on the other end of the line.
“Daniela?”
“I’m here. And I feel the same way about you. You know that, right?”
I close my eyes against the emotion.
Thinking, I could cross the street right now and come inside and tell you
everything.
I am so lost, my love.
Daniela steps down off her chair and walks over to the window. She’s wearing a long, cream-colored sweater over yoga pants. Her hair is up, and she’s holding a mug of what I suspect is tea from a local shop.
She cradles her belly, which is rounded with child.
Charlie is going to be a big brother.
I smile through the tears, wondering what he thinks of that.
It’s something my Charlie missed.
“Jason, are you sure everything’s okay?”
“Positive.”
“Well, look, I’m on a deadline for this client, so…”
“You have to go.”
“I do.”
I don’t want her to. I need to keep hearing her voice.
“Jason?”
“Yes?”
“I love you very much.”
“I love you too. You have no idea.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
No, you’ll see a very lucky version of me who has no clue how good he
has it.
She hangs up.
Goes back to her desk.
I return the phone to my pocket, shivering, my thoughts running in mad directions, toward dark fantasies.
I see the train I’m riding into work derailing.
My body mangled beyond recognition.
Or never found.
I see myself stepping into this life.
It isn’t mine exactly, but maybe it’s close enough.
—
In the evening, I’m still sitting on the bench on Eleanor Street across from the brownstone that isn’t mine, watching our neighbors arrive home from
work and school.
What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day.
To be loved.
To be expected.
I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all
hangs together.
The sky darkens.
Up and down the block, the houses light up.
Jason comes home.
I’m in a bad way.
Haven’t eaten all day.
Water hasn’t touched my lips since morning.
Amanda must be losing her mind wondering where I am, but I can’t drag myself away. My life, or at least a devastating approximation of it, is unfolding right across the street.
—
It’s long after midnight when I unlock the door to our hotel room.
The lights are on, the television blaring.
Amanda climbs out of bed, wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms.
I close the door softly behind me.
I say, “I’m sorry.”
“You asshole.”
“I had a bad day.”
“You had a bad day.”
“Amanda—”
Charging toward me, she shoves me with both hands as hard as she can, sending me crashing back into the door.
She says, “I thought you’d left me. Then I thought something had happened to you. I had no way to get in touch with you. I started calling hospitals, giving them your physical description.”
“I would never just leave you.”
“How am I supposed to know that? You scared me!”
“I’m sorry, Amanda.”
“Where have you been?”
She has me boxed in against the door.
“I just sat on this bench across the street from my house all day.”
“All day? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That isn’t your house, Jason. That isn’t your family.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I also followed Daniela and Jason on a date.”
“What do you mean you followed them?”
“I stood outside the restaurant where they ate.”
The shame hits me as I say the words.
I push past Amanda into the room, take a seat on the end of my bed.
She comes over and stands in front of me.
I say, “They went to a movie after. I followed them inside. Sat behind
them in the theater.”
“Oh, Jason.”
“I did something else stupid.”
“What?”
“I used some of our money to buy a phone.”
“Why did you need a phone?”
“So I could call Daniela and pretend to be her Jason.”
I brace for Amanda to lose it again, but instead she steps toward me and cradles my neck and kisses the top of my head.
“Stand,” she says.
“Why?”
“Just do what you’re told.”
I rise.
She unzips my jacket and helps slide my arms out of the sleeves. Then she pushes me back onto the bed and kneels.
Unlaces my boots.
Pries them off my feet and tosses them into the corner.
I say, “For the first time, I think I understand how the Jason you knew might have done what he did to me. I’m having some fucked-up thoughts.”
“Our minds aren’t built to handle this. Seeing all these different versions of your wife—I can’t even imagine.”
“He must have followed me for weeks. To work. On date nights with Daniela. He probably sat on that same bench and watched us moving through our house at night, imagining me out of the picture. Do you know
what I almost did tonight?”
“What?” She looks scared to hear.
“I figure they probably keep their spare key in the same place we keep it.
I left the movie early. I was going to find the key and let myself inside the house. I wanted to hide in a closet and watch their life. Watch them sleep.
It’s sick, I know. And I know your Jason was probably in my house multiple times before the night he finally worked up the nerve to steal my life.”
“But you didn’t do it.”
“No.”
“Because you’re a decent man.”
“I don’t feel very decent right now.”
I fall back onto the mattress and stare up at the ceiling of this hotel room that, in all its inconsequential permutations, has become our home away
from the box.
Amanda crawls onto the bed beside me.
“This isn’t working, Jason.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re just spinning our wheels.”
“I don’t agree. Look where we started. Remember that first world we stepped into, with the buildings crashing down all around us?”
“I’ve lost count of how many Chicagos we’ve been to.”
“We’re getting closer to my—”
“We’re not getting closer, Jason. The world you’re looking for is a grain
of sand on an infinite beach.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’ve seen your wife murdered. Die of a horrible disease. You’ve seen her not recognize you. Married to other men. Married to multiple versions of you. How much more of this can you take before you suffer a psychotic break? It’s not that far off from your current mental state.”
“It’s not about what I can or can’t take. It’s about finding my Daniela.”
“Really? That’s what you were doing sitting on a bench all day? Looking for your wife? Look at me. We have sixteen ampoules left. We’re running
out of chances.”
My head is pounding.
Spinning.
“Jason.” I feel her hands on my face now. “You know what the definition
of insanity is?”
“What?”
“Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.”
“Next time—”
“What? Next time we’ll find your home? How? You going to fill another notebook tonight? Would it make a difference if you did?” She lays her hand on my chest. “Your heart is going crazy. You have to calm down.”
Rolling over, she turns off the lamp on the table between the beds.
Lies down beside me, but there’s nothing sexual about her touch.
My head feels better with the lights off.
The only illumination in the room is the blue neon light from the sign outside the window, and it’s late enough that the passing cars on the street
below are few and far between.
Sleep is riding in. Mercifully.
I shut my eyes, thinking of the five notebooks stacked on my bedside table. Almost every page is filled with my increasingly manic scrawl. I keep thinking if I write enough, if I’m specific enough, that I’ll capture a full- enough picture of my world to finally take me home.
But it’s not happening.
Amanda isn’t wrong.
I’m looking for a grain of sand on an infinite beach.
