We leave with nothing but the clothes on our backs and a bank envelope filled with cash from our emptied checking and savings accounts. Daniela puts the rental car on our credit card, but every transaction going forward will be cash-only to make us harder to track.
By midafternoon, we’re cruising through Wisconsin.
Rolling pasture
Minor hills.
Red barns.
Silos form a rustic skyline.
Smoke trickles out of farmhouse chimneys.
Everything sparkling under a fresh blanket of snow and the sky a brilliant winter blue.
It’s slow-going, but I keep off the highways.
Stick to the country roads.
Take random, unplanned turns with no destination in mind.
When we stop for gas, Daniela shows me her phone. There’s a stream of missed calls and new texts, all from 773, 847, and 312 Chicago-area phone
numbers.
I open the messaging app.
Dani—It’s Jason, pls call me back at this number immediately.
Daniela, this is Jason. First of all, I love you. There’s so much I have to tell you. Pls call me as soon as you get this.
Daniela, you’re going to be hearing from a bunch of other Jasons if you haven’t already. Your head must be spinning. I am yours. You are mine. I love you forever. Call me the moment you get this.
Daniela the Jason you’re with is an imposter. Call me.
Daniela you and Charlie are not safe. The Jason you’re with isn’t who you think he is. Call me right away.
None of them love you like I do. Call me, Daniela. Pls. Begging you.
Love you.
I will kill them all for you and fix this. Say the word. I will do anything for you.
I stop reading, put a block on each number, and delete the messages.
But one text in particular calls out to me.
It’s not from an unknown number.
It’s from Jason.
My cell number. He’s had my phone all this time. Since the night he grabbed me off the street.
You’re not home, not answering your cell. You must know. All I can say is that I love you. That’s why. My time with you has been the best of my life. Pls call me. Hear me out.
I power off her phone and tell Charlie to turn his off as well. “We have to leave them off,” I say. “From here on out. Any one of them could track us if they’re transmitting.”
As the afternoon turns toward evening and the sun begins to slip, we
drive into the vast Northwoods.
The road is empty.
Ours alone.
We’ve taken numerous summer vacations to Wisconsin but never ventured this far north. And never in winter. We go miles without seeing any signs of civilization, and each town we pass through seems smaller than the one before—crossroads in the middle of nowhere.
A hard silence has taken hold inside the Jeep Cherokee, and I’m not sure
how to break it.
Or rather, that I have the courage to.
All your life you’re told you’re unique. An individual. That no one on the
planet is just like you.
It’s humanity’s anthem.
But that isn’t true for me anymore.
How can Daniela love me more than the other Jasons?
I look at her in the front passenger seat, wondering what she thinks of me now, what she feels toward me.
Hell, what I think of me is up for debate.
She sits quietly beside me, just watching the forest rushing by outside the window.
I reach across the console and hold her hand.
She looks over at me, and then back out the window.
—
At dusk, I drive into a town called Ice River, which feels appropriately remote.
We grab some fast food and then stop at a grocery store to stock up on
food and basic necessities.
Chicago goes on forever.
There’s no breathing space even in the suburbs.
But Ice River just ends.
One second we’re in town, passing an abandoned strip mall with boarded-up storefronts. The next, the buildings and the lights are dwindling away in the side mirror, and we’re cruising through forest and darkness, the headlights firing a cone of brilliance through a narrow corridor of tall pines that edge up close on either side of the road.
Pavement streams under the lights.
We pass no cars.
I take the third turnoff, 1.2 miles north of town, down a one-lane, snowy drive that winds through spruce and birch trees to the end of a small peninsula.
After several hundred yards, the headlights strike the front of a log house that seems to be exactly what I’m looking for.
Like most lakefront residences in this part of the state, it’s dark and
appears uninhabited.
Shuttered for the season.
I pull the Cherokee to a stop in the circular drive and kill the engine.
It’s very dark, very quiet.
I look over at Daniela.
I say, “I know you don’t love the idea, but breaking in is less risky than actually creating a paper trail by renting some place.”
The whole way up from Chicago—six hours—she’s barely spoken.
As if in shock.
She says, “I get it. We’re way past breaking-and-entering at this point anyway, right?”
Opening the door, I step down into a foot of fresh snow.
The cold is sharp.
The air is still.
One of the bedroom windows isn’t latched, so I don’t even have to break glass.
—
We carry the plastic grocery bags up onto the covered porch.
It’s freezing inside.
I hit the lights.
Straight ahead, a staircase ascends into the darkness of the second floor.
Charlie says, “This place is gross.”
It isn’t gross so much as redolent of must and neglect.
A vacation home in the off-season.
We carry our bags into the kitchen and drop them on the counter and wander through the house.
The interior décor straddles the line of cozy and dated.
The appliances are old and white.
The linoleum floor in the kitchen is cracking, and the hardwood floors are scuffed and creaky.
In the living room, a largemouth bass is mounted over the brick hearth, and the walls are covered with fishing lures in frames—at least a hundred of them.
There’s a master bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms on the second floor, one of them crammed tight with triple bunk beds.
We eat Dairy Queen out of greasy paper bags.
The light above us throws a harsh, naked glare on the surface of the kitchen table, but the rest of the house stands dark.
The central heating struggles to warm the interior to a livable
temperature.
Charlie looks cold.
Daniela is quiet, distant.
Like she’s caught in a slow free fall into some dark place.
She barely touches her food.
After dinner, Charlie and I bring in armloads of wood from the front porch, and I use our fast-food bags and an old newspaper to get the fire going.
The wood is dry and gray, several seasons old, and it quickly takes the flame.
Soon the walls of the living room are aglow.
Shadows flickering across the ceiling.
We fold down the sleeper sofa for Charlie and pull it close to the hearth.
Daniela goes to prepare our room.
I sit next to Charlie on the end of the mattress, letting the heat from the fire wash over me.
I say, “If you wake up in the night, throw an extra log on the fire. Maybe we can keep it going until morning, warm this place up.”
He kicks off his Chuck Taylors and pulls his arms out of the sleeves of his hoodie. As he crawls under the covers, it hits me that he’s fifteen years
old now.
His birthday was October 21.
“Hey,” I say. He looks at me. “Happy birthday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I missed it.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“How was it?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“What’d you do?”
“We went to the movies and out to dinner. Then I hung out with Joel and
Angela.”
“Who’s Angela?”
“Friend.”
“Girlfriend?” He blushes in the firelight. “So I’m dying to know—did you pass your driving test?”
He gives up a small smile. “I am the proud owner of a learner’s permit.”
“That’s great. So did he take you?”
Charlie nods.
Fuck. That hurts.
I pull the sheets and blankets up to Charlie’s shoulders and kiss him on the forehead. It’s been years since I actually tucked my son into bed, and I try to savor the moment, to slow it down. But like all good things, it goes by so fast.
Charlie stares up at me in the firelight, asks, “Are you okay, Dad?”
“No. Not really. But I’m with you guys now. That’s all that matters. This other version of me…you liked him?”
“He’s not my father.”
“I know, but did you—?”
“He’s not my father.”
Rising from the sleeper sofa, I toss another log on the fire and trudge back through the kitchen toward the other end of the house, the hardwood floor cracking under my weight.
It’s almost too cold to be sleeping in this room, but Daniela has stripped the beds upstairs and raided the closets for extra blankets.
The walls are wood-paneled.
A space heater glows in the corner, filling the air with the smell of scorched dust.
A sound is coming from inside the bathroom.
Sobbing.
I knock on the hollow-core door.
“Daniela?”
I hear her catch her breath.
“What?”
“Can I come in?”
She’s quiet for a moment.
Then the lock punches out.
I find Daniela huddled in the corner against an old clawfoot tub, her knees drawn into her chest, eyes red and swollen.
I’ve never seen her like this—physically shaking, breaking right in front
of me.
She says, “I can’t. I just…I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“You’re right here in front of me, and I love you so much, but then I think about all those other versions of you, and—”
“They aren’t here, Daniela.”
“They want to be.”
“But they’re not.”
“I don’t know how to think or feel about this. And then I wonder…”
She loses what little composure she had left.
It’s like watching ice crack.
“What do you wonder?” I ask.
“I mean…are you even you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“How do I know you’re my Jason? You say you stepped out our door in early October, and that you didn’t see me again until this morning in the police station. But how do I know you’re the man I love?”
I move down onto the floor.
“Look in my eyes, Daniela.”
She does.
Through tears.
“Can’t you see it’s me? Can’t you tell?”
She says, “I can’t stop thinking about the last month with him. It makes
me sick.”
“What was it like?”
“Jason, don’t do that to me. Don’t do it to you.”
“Every day I was in that corridor, in the box, trying to find my way home —I thought about the two of you. I tried not to, but put yourself in my place.”
Daniela opens her knees, and as I crawl between them, she pulls me in close against her chest and runs her fingers through my hair.
She asks, “Do you really want to know?”
No.
But I have to.
I say, “I’ll always wonder.”
I rest my head against her.
Feel the rise and fall of her chest.
She says, “To be honest, it was amazing at first. The reason I remember that night you went to Ryan’s party so vividly is because of how you—he— acted when you got home. At first, I thought you were drunk, but it wasn’t that. It was like…like you were looking at me in this new way.
“I still remember, all those years ago, the first time we made love in my loft. I was lying in bed, naked, waiting for you. And you just stood at the end of the bed for a minute and stared at me. It felt like it was the first time you had really seen me. Maybe the first time anyone had ever really seen me. It was the hottest thing.
“This other Jason looked at me like that, and there was this new energy between us. Kind of like how it feels when you come home after a weekend at one of your conferences, but way more intense.”
I ask, “So with him, it must’ve been like the first time we were
together?”
She doesn’t answer right away.
Just breathes for a while.
Then says finally, “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“After a couple weeks, it hit me that this wasn’t a one-night, or even one- weekend, kind of thing. I realized that something in you had changed.”
“What was different?”
“A million little things. The way you dressed. The way you got ready in the morning. The things you talked about at dinner.”
“The way I fucked you?”
“Jason.”
“Please don’t lie to me. That, I can’t take.”
“Yes. It was different.”
“Better.”
“Like it was the first time again. You did things you never did. Or hadn’t in a long time. It was like I was something, not that you wanted, but that
you needed. Like I was your oxygen.”
“Do you want this other Jason?”
“No. I want the man I’ve made a life with. The man I made Charlie with.
But I need to know you’re that man.”
I sit up and look at her in this cramped, windowless bathroom in the middle of nowhere that smells faintly of mildew.
She looks at me.
So tired.
Struggling onto my feet, I give her a hand up.
We move into the bedroom.
Daniela climbs into bed, and I hit the lights and crawl in beside her under the freezing sheets.
The frame is creaky, and the slightest movement bangs the headboard against the wall, which rattles the picture frames.
She’s wearing underwear and a white T-shirt, and she smells like she’s been riding in the car all day without a shower—fading deodorant tinged
with funk.
I love it.
She whispers in the dark, “How do we fix this, Jason?”
“I’m working on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ask me again in the morning.”
Her breath in my face is sweet and warm.
The essence of everything I associate with home.
She’s asleep within a moment, breathing deeply in and out.
I think I’m right behind her, but when I close my eyes, my thoughts run rampant. I see versions of me stepping out of elevators. In parked cars.
Sitting on the bench across the street from our brownstone.
I see me everywhere.
The room is dark except for the coils of the space heater glowing in the
corner.
The house lies silent.
I can’t sleep.
I need to fix this.
Quietly, I slide out from under the covers. At the door, I stop and glance back at Daniela, safe under a mountain of blankets.
I head down the noisy hardwood floor of the hallway, the house getting warmer the closer I get to the living room.
The fire is already low.
I add several logs.
For a long time, I sit just staring into the flames, watching the wood slowly crumble into the radiant bed of embers as my son snores softly behind me.
The idea first occurred to me on the drive north today, and I’ve been
mulling it over ever since.
It seemed insane at first.
But the more I pressure-check it, the more it seems like my only option.
In the living room beside the entertainment center, there’s a desk with a ten-year-old Mac and a dinosaur printer. I power the computer on. If there’s a password required or no Internet connection, this will have to wait until tomorrow, when I can find an Internet café or coffee shop in town.
I’m in luck. There’s a guest login option.
I open the web browser and access that asonjayessenday email account.
The hyperlink still works.
Welcome to UberChat!
There are currently seventy-two active participants.
Are you a new user?
I click No and log in with my username and password.
Welcome back Jason9!
Logging you into UberChat now!
The conversation is much longer, with so many participants I break out in a cold sweat.
I scan everything, down through the most recent message, which is less than a minute old.
Jason42: The house has been empty since at least midafternoon.
Jason28: So which of you did this?
Jason4: I followed Daniela from 44 Eleanor St. to the police station on North California.
Jason14: What was she doing there?
Jason25: What was she doing there?
Jason10: What was she doing there?
Jason4: No idea. She went inside, never came out. Her Honda is still there.
Jason66: Does this mean she knows? Is she still in the police station?
Jason4: I don’t know. Something is up.
Jason49: I was nearly killed last night by one of us. He got a key to my hotel room and came in with a knife in the middle of the night.
I start typing…
Jason9: DANIELA AND CHARLIE ARE WITH ME.
Jason92: Safe?
Jason42: Safe?
Jason14: How?
Jason28: Prove it.
Jason4: Safe?
Jason25: How?
Jason10: You fucker.
Jason9: How doesn’t matter, but yes, they’re safe. They’re also very scared. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I assume we all share the
same basic desire, that no matter what, Daniela and Charlie can’t be harmed?
Jason92: Yes.
Jason49: Yes.
Jason66: Yes.
Jason10: Yes.
Jason25: Yes.
Jason4: Yes.
Jason28: Yes.
Jason14: Yes.
Jason103: Yes.
Jason5: Yes.
Jason16: Yes.
Jason82: Yes.
Jason9: I would rather die than see anything happen to them. So here’s what I’m proposing. Two days from now, at midnight, we all meet up at the power plant and conduct a peaceful lottery. The winner gets to live in this world with Daniela and Charlie. Also, we destroy the box, so no other Jasons find their way here.
Jason8: No.
Jason100: No way.
Jason21: How would this work?
Jason38: Never.
Jason28: Prove you have them or fuck off.
Jason8: Why chance? Why not fight it out? Let merit decide.
Jason109: And what happens to the losers? Suicide?
JasonADMIN: For the sake of this conversation not becoming incomprehensible, I’ve temporarily frozen all accounts from participating except me and Jason9. Everyone else can still watch this conversation. Jason9, continue please.
Jason9: I realize there are many ways this could all go wrong. I could decide to not show up. You’d never know. Any number of Jasons could choose not to participate, to essentially wait in the wings for the smoke to clear and then do to one of us what Jason2 did. Except that I know I’ll keep my word, and maybe this is naïve on my part, but I think that means all of you will too. Because you wouldn’t be keeping your word for us. You’d be keeping it for Daniela and Charlie. The other alternative is for me to take them and disappear forever. New identities. A life always on the run. Always looking over our shoulder.
As much as I want to be with them, I don’t want that life for my wife and son. And I don’t have the right to keep them for myself. I feel so strongly about it, I’m willing to submit myself to this lottery, where, judging by the sheer number of us involved, I’m almost certain to lose.
I have to talk to Daniela first, but in the meantime, spread the word.
I’ll be back online tomorrow night with more details, including proof, jason28.
JasonADMIN: I think someone already asked, but what happens to the losers?
Jason9: I don’t know yet. All that matters is our wife and son living out the rest of their lives in peace and safety. If you feel otherwise, you don’t deserve them.
—
Light coming through the curtain wakes me.
Daniela is in my arms.
For the longest time, I just lie there.
Holding her.
This extraordinary woman.
After a while, I disentangle myself and grab my pile of clothes off the floor.
I dress by the remains of the fire—nothing but a bed of coals—and throw
on the last two logs.
We’ve slept in.
The clock on the stove reads 9:30, and through the window above the sink, I see sunlight angling down through the evergreens and birches, making pools of light and shadow across the floor of the forest as far as I can see.
I head outside into the morning chill and step down off the porch.
Past the back of the cabin, the property slopes gently to the edge of a lake.
I walk out to the end of a snowcapped pier.
There’s a rim of ice a few feet out from the shore, but it’s too early in the season, even with the recent storm, for the rest of the lake to have frozen.
I brush the snow off a bench, take a seat, and watch the sun creep up behind the pine trees.
The cold is invigorating. Like an espresso shot.
Mist rises from the surface of the water.
I register footsteps squeaking in the snow behind me.
Turning, I see Daniela coming down the pier, following in my footprints.
She’s carrying two steaming mugs of coffee, her hair is a gorgeous wreck, and she has several blankets thrown around her shoulders like a shawl.
As I watch her approach, it occurs to me that in all likelihood, this is the last morning I’ll ever get to spend with her. I’ll be returning to Chicago first thing tomorrow. Alone.
Handing me both mugs, she takes one of her blankets and wraps it around me. Then she sits on the bench and we drink our coffees and stare out across the lake.
I say, “I always thought we’d end up in a place like this.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to move to Wisconsin.”
“When we’re older. Find a cabin to fix up.”
“Can you fix things up?” She laughs. “I’m kidding. I know what you mean.”
“Maybe spend summers here with the grandchildren. You could paint by
the lakeshore.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know. Finally catch up on my New Yorker subscription. Just be with you.”
She reaches down and touches the piece of thread that’s still tied around my ring finger. “What’s this?”
“Jason2 took my wedding ring, and there was a point early on where I was beginning to lose my grasp on what was real. On who I was. If I’d ever been married to you. So I tied this string around my finger as a reminder that you, this version of you, existed.”
She kisses me.
For a long time.
I say, “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“In that first Chicago I woke up in—the one where I found you at this art
installation about the multiverse—”
“What?” She smiles. “Did you fuck me?”
“Yeah.”
The smile dies.
She just stares at me for a moment, and there’s almost no emotion in her voice when she asks, “Why?”
“I didn’t know where I was or what was happening to me. Everyone thought I was crazy. I was starting to think so too. Then I found you—the only familiar thing in a world that was completely wrong. I wanted so badly for that Daniela to be you, but she wasn’t. She couldn’t be. Just like the other Jason isn’t me.”
“So you were just fucking your way across the multiverse then?”
“That was the only time, and I didn’t realize where I was when it happened. I didn’t know if I was losing my mind or what.”
“And how was she? How was I?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“I told you.”
“Fair enough. It was just the way you described this other Jason coming home that first night. It was like being with you before I knew I loved you.
Like experiencing that incredible connection all over again for the first time. What are you thinking right now?”
“I’m figuring out how mad I should be at you.”
“Why should you be mad at all?”
“Oh, is that your argument? It isn’t cheating if it’s another version of
me?”
“I mean, it’s original at least.”
This makes her laugh.
That it makes her laugh says everything about why I love her.
“What was she like?” Daniela asks.
“She was you without me. Without Charlie. She was sort of dating Ryan Holder.”
“Shut up. And I was this successful artist?”
“You were.”
“Did you like my installation?”
“It was brilliant. You were brilliant. Do you want to hear about it?”
“I’d love to.”
I tell her about the Plexiglas labyrinth, what it felt like to walk through it.
The startling imagery. The spectacular design.
It makes her eyes light up.
And it makes her sad.
“Do you think I was happy?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“With everything I’d given up to be this woman.”
“I don’t know. I was with this woman for forty-eight hours. I think, like you, like me, like everyone, she had regrets. I think sometimes she woke up in the night wondering if the path she took was the right one. Afraid it wasn’t. Wondering what a life with me might have been like.”
“I wonder those things sometimes.”
“I’ve seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist.
Teacher. Graphic designer. But it’s all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you’re in it, it’s all just day-to-day, right? And isn’t that what you have to make your peace with?”
Out in the middle of the lake, a fish jumps, its splash sending perfect, concentric ripples across the glasslike water.
I say, “Last night, you asked me how we fix this.”
“Any bright ideas?”
My first instinct is to protect her from the knowledge of what I’m contemplating, but our marriage isn’t built on keeping secrets. We talk about everything. The hardest things. It’s embedded in our identity as a couple.
And so I tell her what I proposed to the chat room last night and watch the expression on her face move through flashes of anger, horror, shock, and fear.
She says finally, “You want to raffle me off? Like a fucking fruit basket?”
“Daniela—”
“I don’t need you doing something heroic.”
“No matter what happens, you’re going to have me back.”
“But some other version of you. That’s what you’re saying, right? And what if he’s like this asshole who ruined our lives? What if he isn’t good like you?”
I look away from her, out across the lake, and blink through the tears.
She asks, “Why would you sacrifice yourself so someone else can be with me?”
“We all have to sacrifice ourselves, Daniela. That’s the only way it works out for you and Charlie. Please. Just let me make your lives in Chicago safe again.”
—
When we walk back inside, Charlie is at the stovetop flipping pancakes.
“Smells great,” I say.
He asks, “Will you make your fruit thing?”
“Sure.”
It takes me a moment to locate the cutting board and a knife.
I stand next to my son, peeling the apples and dicing them and adding the pieces to a saucepan filled with simmering maple syrup.
Through the windows, the sun climbs higher and the forest fills with light.
We eat together and talk comfortably, and there are moments where it feels almost normal, where the fact that this is likely the last breakfast I’ll ever share with them isn’t at the forefront of my mind.
—
In the early afternoon, we head to town on foot, walking down the middle of the faded country road, the pavement dry in the sun, snow-packed in the shadows.
We buy clothes at a thrift shop and then go to a matinee in a little downtown cinema showing a movie that came out six months ago.
It’s a stupid romantic comedy.
It’s just what we need.
We stay through the credits, until the lights come up, and as we step out of the theater, the sky is already growing dark.
At the edge of town, we take a shot with the only restaurant that’s open—
the Ice River Roadhouse.
We sit at the bar.
Daniela orders a glass of pinot noir. I order a beer for me, a Coke for Charlie.
The place is crowded, the only thing going on on a weeknight in Ice
River, Wisconsin.
We order food.
I drink a second beer, and then a third.
Before long, Daniela and I are buzzed and the noise of the roadhouse
growing.
She puts her hand on my leg.
Her eyes are glassy from the wine, and it feels so good to be close to her again. I’m trying not to think about how every little thing that happens is my last experience of it, but the knowledge weighs so heavy.
The roadhouse keeps filling up.
It’s wonderfully noisy.
A band begins to set up on a small stage in the back.
I’m drunk.
Not belligerent or sloppy.
Just perfectly lit up.
If I think about anything other than the moment, I tear up, so I don’t think about anything other than the moment.
The band is a country-and-western four-piece, and soon Daniela and I are slow-dancing in a mass of people on a tiny dance floor.
Her body is pressed against mine, my hand cupping the small of her back, and between the steel guitar and the way she’s looking at me, I want nothing more than to take her back to our creaky bed with the loose headboard and knock all the picture frames off the walls.
—
Daniela and I are laughing, and I’m not even sure why.
Charlie says, “You guys are wasted.”
It might be an overstatement, but not by much.
I say, “There was steam to blow off.”
He says to Daniela, “Hasn’t felt like this in the last month, has it?”
She looks at me.
“No, it hasn’t.”
We stagger up the highway in the dark, no headlights behind us or ahead.
The woods utterly silent.
Not even a breath of wind.
As still as a painting.
—
I lock the door to our room.
Daniela helps me lift the mattress off the bed.
We set it on the floorboards and kill the lights and take off all our clothes.
It’s chilly in the room, even with the space heater running.
We climb naked and shivering under the blankets.
Her skin is smooth and cool against mine, her mouth soft and warm.
I kiss her.
She says that she needs me inside of her so much it hurts.
Being with Daniela isn’t like being home.
It defines home.
I remember thinking that the first time I made love to her fifteen years ago. Thinking that I’d found something I didn’t even know I’d been searching for.
It holds even more true tonight as the hardwood floor groans softly beneath us and the moonlight steals between the break in the curtains just enough to light her face as her mouth opens and her head tilts back and she whispers, so urgently, my name.
—
We’re sweaty, our hearts racing in the silence.
Daniela runs her fingers through my hair, and she’s staring at me in the
dark the way I love.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Charlie was right.”
“About?”
“What he said on the walk home. It hasn’t been like this since Jason2 came here. You aren’t replaceable. Not even by you. I keep thinking about how we met. At that point in our lives, we could’ve crashed into anyone.
But you showed up at that backyard party and saved me from that asshole. I know part of our story is the electricity of our connection, but the other part is equally miraculous. It’s the simple fact that you walked into my life at the exact moment you did. You instead of someone else. In some ways, isn’t
that even more incredible than the connection itself? That we found each
other at all?”
“It’s remarkable.”
“What I realized is that the same thing happened yesterday. Of all the versions of Jason, it was you who pulled that crazy stunt at the diner, which landed you in jail, which brought us safely together.”
“So you’re saying it’s fate.”
She smiles. “I think I’m saying we found each other, for a second time.”
—
We make love again and fall asleep.
In the dead of night, she wakes me, whispers in my ear, “I don’t want you
to leave.”
I turn over onto my side and face her.
Her eyes are wide open in the dark.
My head hurts.
My mouth is dry.
I’m caught in that disorienting transition between inebriation and hangover, when the pleasure slowly morphs into pain.
“What if we just kept driving?” she says.
“To where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are we supposed to tell Charlie? He has friends. Maybe a girlfriend. We just tell him to forget all that? He’s finally happy at school.”
“I know,” she says, “and I hate it, but yes, that’s what we tell him.”
“Where we live, our friends, our jobs—those things define us.”
“They’re not all that defines us. As long as I’m with you, I know exactly who I am.”
“Daniela, I want nothing more than to be with you, but if I don’t do this thing tomorrow, you and Charlie will never be safe. And no matter what happens, you will still have me.”
“I don’t want some other version of you. I want you.”
—
I wake in the dark to my pulse pounding in my head and my mouth bone- dry.
Pulling on my jeans and shirt, I stagger down the hall.
With no fire tonight, the sole source of illumination on the entire ground level is a timid nightlight plugged into an outlet above the kitchen counter.
I take a glass from the cabinet and fill it at the tap.
Drink it down.
Fill it again.
The central heating cuts off.
I stand at the sink, sipping the cold well water.
The cabin so quiet I can hear the floor popping as the wood fibers expand and contract in distant corners of the house.
Through the window over the kitchen sink, I stare into the woods.
I love that Daniela wants me, but I don’t know where we go from here. I
don’t know how to keep them safe.
My head is spinning.
A little ways beyond the Jeep, something catches my attention.
A shadow moving across the snow.
Adrenaline surges.
I set the glass down, head to the front door, and step into my boots.
On the porch, I button my shirt and walk into the trodden snow between
the steps and the car.
Then out past the Jeep.
There.
I see what caught my eye from the kitchen.
As I approach, it’s still moving.
Larger than I first thought.
The size of a man.
No.
Jesus.
It is a man.
The path along which he’s dragged himself is plain to see by the streaks of blood that look black in the starlight.
He’s groaning as he crawls in the direction of the front porch. He’s never
going to make it.
I reach him, kneel beside him.
It’s me, right down to the coat and the Velocity Laboratories backpack and the ring of thread.
He’s holding his stomach with one hand, which is covered in steaming blood, and he looks up at me with the most desperate eyes I’ve ever seen.
I ask, “Who did this to you?”
“One of us.”
“How’d you find me here?”
He coughs up a mist of blood. “Help me.”
“How many of us are here?”
“I think I’m dying.”
I look around. It only takes me a second to lock on the pair of blood- tinged footprints moving away from this Jason toward the Jeep, and then on
around the side of the cabin.
The dying Jason is saying my name.
Our name.
Begging for my help.
And I want to help him, but all I can think is—they found us.
Somehow, they found us.
He says, “Don’t let them hurt her.”
I look back at the car.
I didn’t notice at first, but now I see that all the tires have been slashed.
Somewhere in the near distance, I hear footsteps in the snow.
I scan the woods for movement, but the starlight doesn’t penetrate the denser forest farther out from the cabin.
He says, “I’m not ready for this.”
I look down into his eyes as my own panic builds. “If this is the end, be
brave.”
A gunshot shreds the silence.
It came from behind the cabin, near the lake.
I race back through the snow, past the Jeep, sprinting toward the front porch, trying to process what’s happening.
From inside the cabin, Daniela calls my name.
I climb the steps.
Crash through the front door.
Daniela is coming down the hallway, wrapped in a blanket and backlit by the light spilling out of the master bedroom.
My son approaches from the kitchen.
I lock the front door behind me as Daniela and Charlie converge in the
foyer.
She asks, “Was that a gunshot?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s happening?”
“They found us.”
“Who?”
“I did.”
“How is that possible?”
“We have to leave right now. Both of you head to our bedroom, get dressed, start getting our things together. I’m going to make sure the back
door is locked, then I’ll join you.”
They head down the hallway.
The front door is secure.
The only other way into the house is through the French doors that lead from the screened-in porch into the living room.
I move through the kitchen.
Daniela and Charlie will be looking to me to tell them what’s next.
And I have no idea.
We can’t take the car.
We’ll have to leave on foot.
As I reach the living room, my thoughts come in a raging stream of
consciousness.
What do we need to bring with us?
Phones.
Money.
Where’s our money?
In an envelope in the bottom dresser drawer of our bedroom.
What else do we need?
What can we not forget?
How many versions of me tracked us here?
Am I going to die tonight?
By my own hand?
I feel my way through the darkness, past the sleeper sofa, to the French doors. As I reach down to test the handles, I realize—it shouldn’t be this cold in here.
Unless these doors were recently opened.
As in a few seconds ago.
They’re locked now, and I don’t remember locking them.
Through the glass panes, I can see something on the patio, but it’s too dark to make out any detail. I think it’s moving.
I need to get back to my family.
As I turn away from the French doors, a shadow rises from behind the
sofa.
My heart stops.
A lamp blinks on.
I see myself standing ten feet away, one hand on the light switch, the other pointing a gun at me.
He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
His hands are covered in blood.
Coming around the sofa with the gun aimed at my face, he says quietly, “Take your clothes off.”
The slash across his face identifies him.
I glance behind me through the French doors.
The lamplight illuminates just enough of the patio for me to see a pile of clothes—Timberlands and a peacoat—and another Jason lying on his side, his head in a pool of blood, throat laid open.
He says, “I won’t tell you again.”
I start undoing the buttons of my shirt.
“We know each other,” I say.
“Obviously.”
“No, that cut on your face. We had beers together two nights ago.”
I watch that piece of information land, but it doesn’t derail him like I’d hoped.
He says, “That doesn’t change what has to happen. This is the end, brother. You’d do the same and you know it.”
“I wouldn’t, actually. I thought so at first, but I wouldn’t.”
I slide my arms out of the sleeves, toss him the shirt.
I know what he’s planning: dress himself in my clothes. Go to Daniela pretending to be me. He’ll have to reopen the slash across his face to make
it look like a fresh wound.
I say, “I had a plan to protect her.”
“Yeah, I read it. I’m not sacrificing myself so someone else can be with my wife and son. Jeans too.”
I unbutton them, thinking, I misjudged. We’re not all the same.
“How many of us have you murdered tonight?” I ask.
“Four. I’ll kill a thousand of you if that’s what it takes.”
As I pull off the jeans, one leg at a time, I say, “Something happened to you in the box, in those worlds you mentioned. What turned you into this?”
“Maybe you don’t want them back badly enough. And if that’s the case, you don’t deserve them any—”
I throw the jeans at his face and rush him.
Wrapping my arms around Jason’s thighs, I lift with everything I’ve got and run him straight into the wall, crushing the air out of his lungs.
The gun hits the floor.
I kick it into the kitchen as Jason crumples and drive my knee into his
face.
I hear bone crunch.
Grabbing his head, I bring my knee back for another blow, but he sweeps my left leg out from under me.
I slam into the hardwood floor, the back of my head hitting so hard I see bursts of light, and then he’s on top of me, blood dripping off his ruined face, one hand squeezing my throat.
When he hits me, I feel my cheek fracture in a supernova of pain below
my left eye.
He hits me again.
I blink through a sheet of tears and blood, and the next time I can see clearly, he’s holding a knife in the hand he was hitting me with.
Gunshot.
My ears ringing.
A small black hole through his sternum and blood spilling out of it and down the center of his chest. The knife drops from his hands onto the floor beside me. I watch him put a finger in the hole and try to plug it, but the blood won’t be stopped.
He takes a wet, ragged breath and looks up at the man who shot him.
I crane my neck too, just enough to see another Jason aiming a gun at him. This one is clean-shaven, and he’s wearing the black leather jacket that Daniela gave me ten years ago for our anniversary.
On his left hand, a gold wedding band gleams.
My ring.
Jason2 pulls the trigger again, and the next bullet shears off the side of
my attacker’s skull.
He topples.
I turn over and sit up slowly.
Spitting blood.
My face on fire.
Jason2 aims the gun at me.
He’s going to pull the trigger.
I actually see my death coming, and I have no words, just a fleeting image of me as a child on my grandparents’ farm in western Iowa. A warm spring day. A massive sky. Cornfields. I’m dribbling a soccer ball through the backyard toward my brother, who’s guarding the “goal”—a space between two maple trees.
I think, Why this last memory on the brink of my death? Was I the most happy in that moment? The most purely myself?
“Stop it!”
Daniela is standing in the kitchen nook, dressed now.
She looks at Jason2.
She looks at me.
At the Jason with a bullet through his head.
The Jason on the screened-in porch with his throat cut.
And somehow, without so much as a tremor in her voice, she manages to
ask, “Where is my husband?”
Jason2 looks momentarily thrown.
I wipe the blood out of my eyes. “Right here.”
“What did we do tonight?” she asks.
“We danced to bad country music, came home, and made love.” I look at the man who stole my life. “You’re the one who kidnapped me?”
He looks at Daniela.
“She knows everything,” I say. “There’s no point in lying.”
Daniela asks, “How could you do this to me? To our family?”
Charlie appears beside his mother, taking in the horror all around us.
Jason2 looks at her.
Then at Charlie.
Jason2 is only six or seven feet away, but I’m sitting on the floor.
I couldn’t reach him before he pulled the trigger.
I think, Get him talking.
“How’d you find us?” I ask.
“Charlie’s cell has a find-my-phone app.”
Charlie says, “I only turned it on for one text late last night. I didn’t want Angela to think I’d blown her off.”
I look at Jason2. “And the other Jasons?”
“I don’t know. I guess they followed me here.”
“How many?”
“I have no idea.” He turns to Daniela. “I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could’ve been. That’s why—”
“Then you should’ve stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the
chance.”
“Then I wouldn’t have built the box.”
“And that would be so terrible, why? Look around. Has your life’s work caused anything but pain?”
He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”
Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”
So slowly, I transfer my weight onto my feet.
But he catches me, says, “Don’t even.”
“You going to kill me in front of them?” I ask. “Really?”
“You had such enormous dreams,” he says to me. “You could’ve stayed in my world, in the life I built, and actually lived them.”
“Oh, is that how you justify what you did?”
“I know how your mind works. The horror you face every day walking to the train to go teach, thinking, Is this really it? Maybe you’re brave enough
to admit it. Maybe you’re not.”
I say, “You don’t get to—”
“Actually, I do get to judge you, Jason, because I am you. Maybe we branched into different worlds fifteen years ago, but we’re wired the same.
You weren’t born to teach undergrad physics. To watch people like Ryan Holder win the acclaim that should’ve been yours. There is nothing you can’t do. I know, because I’ve done it all. Look at what I built. I could wake up in your brownstone every morning and look myself in the mirror because I achieved everything I ever wanted. Can you say the same? What
have you done?”
“I made a life with them.”
“I handed you, handed both of us, what everyone secretly wants. The chance to live two lives. Our best two lives.”
“I don’t want two lives. I want them.”
I look at Daniela. I look at my son.
Daniela says to Jason2, “And I want him. Please. Let us have our life.
You don’t have to do this.”
His face hardens.
His eyes narrow.
He moves toward me.
Charlie screams, “No!”
The gun is inches from my face.
I stare up into my doppelgänger’s eyes, ask, “So you kill me and then what? What does it get you? It won’t make her want you.”
His hand is trembling.
Charlie starts toward Jason2.
“Don’t you touch him.”
“Stay put, son.” I stare down the barrel of the gun. “You’ve lost, Jason.”
Charlie is still coming, Daniela trying to hold him back, but he rips his arm away.
As Charlie closes in, Jason2’s eyes cut away from me for a split second.
I slap the gun out of his hand, grab the knife off the floor, and bury it in his stomach, the blade sliding in with almost no resistance.
Standing, I jerk the knife out, and as Jason2 falls into me, grasping my shoulders, I stick him again with the blade.
Over and over and over.
So much blood pouring through his shirt and onto my hands, and the rusted smell of it filling the room.
He’s clutching me, the knife still embedded in his gut.
I think about him with Daniela as I twist the blade and rip it out and
shove him away from me.
He teeters.
Grimacing.
Holding his stomach.
Blood leaking through his fingers.
His legs fail him.
He sits, and then, with a groan, stretches out on his side and lets his head rest against the floor.
I lock eyes with Daniela and Charlie. Then I go to Jason2 and search his pockets as he moans, finally emerging with my set of car keys.
“Where’s the Suburban?” I ask.
When he answers, I have to lean in close to hear his voice: “A quarter mile past the turnoff. On the shoulder.”
I rush over to the clothes I stripped out of just moments ago, dressing quickly.
When I finish buttoning my shirt, I bend down to tie my boots, glancing over at Jason2, bleeding out on the floorboards of this old cabin.
I lift the gun from the floor and wipe the grip off on my jeans.
We need to leave.
Who knows how many more are coming.
My doppelgänger says my name.
I look over—he’s holding my wedding band in his blood-soaked fingers.
I walk to him, and as I take the ring and slide it onto my finger over the ring of thread, Jason2 grabs my arm and pulls me down toward his face.
He’s trying to say something.
I say, “I can’t hear you.”
“Look…in…the glove box.”
Charlie comes over, wrapping his arms fiercely around me, trying to hold back tears, but his shoulders jerk and the sobs break loose. As he cries in my arms like a little boy, I think of the horror he’s just witnessed, and it
brings tears to my eyes.
I hold his face between my hands.
I say, “You saved my life. If you hadn’t tried to stop him, I never
would’ve had a chance.”
“Really?”
“Really. Also I’m going to stomp your fucking phone into pieces. Now we have to leave. Back door.”
We rush through the living room, sidestepping pools of blood.
I unlock the French doors, and as Charlie and Daniela move out onto the screened-in porch, I glance back at the man who caused all this.
His eyes are still open, blinking slowly, watching us go.
Stepping outside, I pull the doors closed after me.
I have to track through the blood of one more Jason to reach the screen
door.
I’m not sure which way to go.
We head down to the shoreline, follow it north through the trees.
The lake as smooth and black as obsidian.
I keep scanning the woods for other Jasons—one could step out from behind a tree and take my life at any second.
After a hundred yards, we turn from the shoreline and move in the general direction of the road.
Four gunshots ring out at the cabin.
We’re running now, struggling through the snow, all of us gasping for breath.
The adrenaline tide is keeping the pain of my bruised face at bay, but I wonder for how much longer.
We break out of the forest onto the road.
I stand on the double-yellow line, and for a moment, the woods are silent.
“Which way?” Daniela asks.
“North.”
We jog down the middle of the road.
Charlie says, “I see it.”
Straight ahead, off the right-side shoulder, I clock the back of our Suburban pulled halfway into the trees.
We pile inside, and as I push the key into the ignition, I catch movement in the side mirror—a shadow sprinting toward us on the road.
I crank the engine, release the emergency brake, and shift into gear.
Whipping the Suburban around, I pin the gas pedal to the floor.
I say, “Get down.”
“Why?” Daniela asks.
“Just do it!”
We accelerate into darkness.
I punch on the lights.
They fire straight onto Jason, standing in the middle of the road, aiming a
gun at the car.
There’s a burst of fire.
A bullet punctures the windshield and rips through the headrest an inch
away from my right ear.
Another muzzle flash, another gunshot.
Daniela screams.
How broken must this version of me be to risk hitting Daniela and Charlie?
Jason tries to step out of the way a half second too late.
The right edge of the bumper clips his waist, the contact devastating.
It slings him around hard and fast, his head slamming into the front passenger window with enough force to break the glass.
In the rearview mirror, I watch him tumble across the road as we keep
accelerating.
“Anyone hurt?” I ask.
“I’m fine,” Charlie says.
Daniela sits back up.
“Daniela?”
“I’m okay,” she says, beginning to brush the pebbles of safety glass out of her hair.
—
We speed down the dark highway.
No one says a word.
It’s three in the morning, and we’re the only car on the road.
The night air streams through the bullet holes in the windshield, the road noise deafening through the broken window beside Daniela’s head.
I ask, “Do you still have your phone with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Give it to me. Yours too, Charlie.”
They hand them over, and I lower my window several inches and chuck the phones out of the car.
“They’re going to keep coming, aren’t they?” she asks. “They’re never going to stop.”
She’s right. The other Jasons can’t be trusted. I was wrong about the lottery.
I say, “I thought there was a way to fix this.”
“So what do we do?”
Exhaustion crushes down on me.
My face hurting more every second.
I look over at Daniela. “Open the glove box.”
“What am I looking for?” she asks.
“I’m not sure.”
She pulls out the Suburban’s owner’s manual.
Our insurance and registration paperwork.
A tire-pressure gauge.
A flashlight.
And a small leather bag I know all too well.
