Well. If that’s the case, then the best thing I can do is to prove to Alberto I’m a hard worker. I produce a smile. “Big day tomorrow. I’m off to bed.”
I can feel him watching me as I make my way back down the hall to my room.
I reach for my clothing on the nightstand and fumble for the phone in the pocket of my cargo pants. I turn it on, but there is no signal.
There’s a soft knock, and the door opens before I can respond. Wyatt leans in, his face limned in shadows, his eyes an abiding blue. He sees me holding the phone.
I feel my cheeks flush with heat. “Guess I should have upgraded to an international service plan,” I murmur.
“You have everything you need?” he asks politely.
I nod.
“Harbi will knock at four-thirty. Breakfast is at five in the main room.” He hesitates. “I’m not going to go easy on you.”
“I know.”
His fingers tighten on the doorjamb. “I hope you also realize that choosing to hide from the world in a tomb that’s bound to become a media circus may not be effective.”
“Noted.”
He glances at the book sitting beside me. “If you’re looking for something to pass the time I have far better material. There’s still some Jackie Collins around, I’m sure. Joe loves manga. Or you could try one of my later publications, after I succumbed to the joy of the Oxford comma.”
“That’s okay. I want to read this one.”
He inclines his head. The moon, spilling through a window in the hallway, silvers his hair and deepens the lines that bracket his mouth. For a moment, I can see his future.
“Sleep well, then.”
He says the words, but he doesn’t leave. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know how to put himself on the other side of the door. Years ago, when he snuck into my room, he would wedge the desk chair under the knob for privacy, barricading us in, together.
“Wyatt?” I say, my throat dry. “Thank you. For the citation.”
He looks up at me with such wonder that it is clear he included that footnote as an emergency flare, an SOS across continents and oceans. Finally, against all odds, it had found its recipient.
“You’re welcome, Olive,” he says, and he closes the door behind himself.
HARVARDSQUARE ISdissected by roads, an ill-fitting puzzle. The university is sprinkled across the sections, with a cluster of Georgian brick buildings in the main yard. This summer, Brian is teaching at their extension school. It’s good money and easy work, since the topics he covers are layman-friendly versions of the ones he gives to physics students during the academic year.
I slip into the rear of the lecture hall just as he puts up his first slide, and try to see him the way the others do.
Brian has jet-black hair, with silver threads only just starting to show. He’s tall and lean and rangy, and I know that at least one undergrad wrote an ode about his eyes—something that included a shaft of sunlight falling through a forest, and about which I’d teased him for weeks. He wears a professor’s uniform: wrinkled button-down shirt, rumpled blazer, khaki pants, Oxfords. He is the kind of guy whose collar you want to fix, whose jacket you want to smooth, whose hair you want to push out of his eyes, just so that he will look down at you, sheepishly, with a shared secret and a stealth smile that feels like a jolt to the heart.
I look around the lecture hall. Since this is an extension class, it’s not just college-age kids. There are elderly couples, women in yoga pants, professionals whose schedules allow them to take a long lunch break. “According to quantum mechanics,” Brian says, “you may well be immortal.” He reminds me of a tiger as he paces in front of an audience that knows he is toying with them. “A very controversial proposal was put forth by Max Tegmark—from that physics department down the street.” He means MIT, and that makes some of the audience laugh. “It’s called ‘quantum suicide.’ ” He clicks a remote in his hand and a slide appears: a ket bracket with pictures of an electron, a gun, and a kitten inside. “You remember the quantum state of the electron that spins both ways at the same time? The one that both killed and didn’t kill Schrödinger’s cat? Let’s take that a step farther. Let’s say that in this ket, we have that spinning electron, and a trigger, and a gun…but now,youtake the place of the cat. If the electron spins clockwise, the trigger goes off, the gun fires, and you’re dead. If the electron spins counterclockwise, the trigger doesn’t go off, the gun never fires, and you live. We’re playing Russian roulette with an electron.”
A new slide appears on the screen. “We know that the laws of quantum mechanics say that as a result of this experiment, you’ll be split into two versions: one who gets killed, and one who does not. In one universe, you leave your physics lab and go pick your kid up from summer camp and have a beer on the back porch and watch an episode ofFleabagon Amazon Prime. In the other universe, everyone’s coming to your funeral.”
He spreads his hands. “Here’s where it gets really interesting. The dead version of you has no experience of where you are and what’s happening. Because, face it, you’re dead. On the other hand, the live, conscious version of you bears witness to the fact that you’ve survived the experiment. So theonlyoutcome you will ever perceive, if you run the quantum suicide experiment, is the one where you live. You can literally run it a thousand times, and every single time—a statistical near impossibility—you will survive…because that is the only version of you thatcanexperience anything.”
He raises a brow. “Ironically, for those of you who are still doubting the concept of a multiverse, this experiment might actually prove to you that parallel universes exist. If there actually is only a single universe, you should expect to die half the time you run the experiment. But…if there truly are multiple universes, and you perform the quantum suicide experiment a few dozen times andalwayscome out alive, you can’t help but admit that multiple worlds or timelinesmustexist.”
I sink back into the wooden chair, wondering if another version of myself is in a world where her husband catches her eye just then and smiles to see her there.
If it fixes everything between them.
When Meret was ten we took her to Disney World. I was most excited about Space Mountain—a roller coaster in the dark. But in the middle of our ride, our little car screeched to a stop. A voice came over a loudspeaker, asking us to remain seated, while a technical difficulty was addressed. And then the lights came on.
If it had been exciting in the dark, it was terrifying well lit. I could suddenly see how tight the curves were, how little space existed between the tops of our heads and the tracks. It was absolutely shocking, in its transformation. What I thought I’d been looking at was something else entirely.
