1 #2
Nico came to visit me at the school that winter.
“You’re not missing anything in Paris,” she said, when we went for a walk together after classes ended for the day.
Our destination was a café in the local village.
It was January and raining, but not cool enough for jackets, so we walked in our T-shirts under umbrellas.
She looked tired, I thought, like she’d been travelling too hard.
She’d been meeting with scientists elsewhere in Europe, but she didn’t really want to talk about it.
I suspected she’d been dismissed more than once as a lunatic, showing up at universities and asking to speak with fringe members of the physics department about the possibilities of travel between parallel universes. It must have taken a toll.
“I sometimes miss it, though,” I said. “Just seeing people I don’t go to school with.”
We were walking down a perfectly straight driveway lined with dripping trees, the passage from school to village.
“The dome construction is unbelievably loud. Everyone’s always in a bad mood.”
“Everyone in Paris is always in a bad mood anyway,” I said.
“It’s worse now, though. No one can sleep.”
“Nico,” I said, “can I ask you about Ari Soriano?”
“Why?”
“She has my father’s painting.”
Nico gave me an appraising look. “You’re talking about that painting Gloria sold her, all those years ago?”
“Swan Dive,” I said. “I loved the painting, Gloria told me it belonged to my father, and then she sold it.”
“You’ve told me that a few times.”
“The painting was in the other place too, wasn’t it? The place you came from.” Two girls from my school were approaching, in the opposite direction, and the one closest to me was wearing a distractingly tight shirt.
“It hung in the lab,” Nico said quietly. “I always thought it was beautiful.”
“Can you tell me anything more about Ari?” I was distracted by the girls.
“She did a lot of different things,” Nico said.
“She worked for a militia for a while, in the Republic of Ohio, then she got into some kind of trouble that sent her fleeing to Paris. Then she was a kind of professional wife for a year or two, married to a retired mercenary. I visited her in the hospital a few times, after he died, but I’ve barely spoken with her since. ”
We’d almost reached the end of the avenue. The damp streets of the village were ahead, and the boba tea café was lit up, windows shining in the gloom. Few people moved in the streets.
“What about before the militia?”
“Look, Sebastian, these are all just biographical details. If you’re trying to understand her,” Nico said, “the only important point is that she doesn’t trust anyone, and I don’t think she cares very much about anyone but herself. She does whatever she wants.”
I was careful to maintain a neutral expression, but what I was thinking was, There’s freedom in that.
We’d reached the café, and I held the door open for Nico.
It had been built as a farmhouse in the seventeenth century and now it was a warm, crowded place, with tiny round tables and uncomfortable wood chairs.
The fragrance of tea and sugar and fruit was intoxicating.
I found us a table by the far window, with a view of the grey village square, and went to get boba tea.
When I returned she was gazing out the window, and for the first time I noticed my friend Cole at the next table, drinking tea and eating miniature waffles with Aurélie, who he was dating these days.
I nodded and waved in the most minimal way possible, really just the twitch of a hand—that was the only socially acceptable way to say hello that year, and even at fifteen I thought that was stupid—and settled into the chair just behind Aurélie’s.
Her handbag was hanging precariously on her chair back.
“Who did you see this time?” I asked Nico. “On your research trip.”
She sighed. “I was in Copenhagen,” she said.
“Talking to a professor there who had ideas about travel between parallel universes. Did I say professor? Ex-professor. Defrocked professor. He was basically a paperweight. He couldn’t be fired for contractual reasons, but he hadn’t taught a class in decades. ”
“What were his ideas?”
“He has an idea about objects,” she said. “A notion that objects might be where parallel universes converge, and that if one could identify an object that exists in two universes, it might be possible to use the object to travel between them.”
“How, though,” I said.
“Indeed, Sebastian. How.”
“Wait, is this like the quantum entanglement thing you tried to explain to me?”
“Even stranger,” she said. “I don’t know how deep you’ve gone into physics at this point.”
“Not very. No one comes here for the science classes.”
“All objects emit electromagnetic radiation.”
“Okay.”
“This professor, his theory was that identical objects, existing in different universes, might emit precisely the same electromagnetic radiation, so in other words a unique signature, so to speak, which might link the objects in space-time. But as I said to him, there’s no way of testing the hypothesis that either the objects or the signatures are exactly the same, and of course none of that would explain how a door could open between them. ”
“What did he say to that?”
“That he was still developing his theory,” she said, with an unpleasant smile. I could tell she thought he was stupid.
“I’d think there would be doors everywhere if it were true,” I said. “I mean, if I think about how many objects must exist in more than one universe.”
“Right, and believe me, there aren’t doors everywhere. I’ve looked.”
“I know,” I said. “You’ve been looking all my life.”
Nico glanced at me, and the thing we never talked about—I needed her to be my parent because my parents were shadows, and she needed to find a way home to her actual children—flitted between us. “The thing with his theory,” she said, “is I’m a physicist too, and it made no sense to me.”
“But?”
Nico smiled at me. “You know me so well,” she said. “But I can’t stop thinking about Swan Dive.”
“Why?”
“Because it hung in the lab,” she said, “in the other place. Of course it’s interesting to imagine that perhaps it had something to do with .
. . with what happened.” She was looking out the window again.
A couple and a child were walking a dog in the rain.
“But it’s absurd, I think,” she said. “The idea of an object as a conduit. If I had any faith in the theory, I’d go looking for the painting myself, but, well, I don’t.
I think there must be countless objects that exist in both worlds, and I think the painting’s a red herring. ”
“But it was something you loved?” I asked.
Nico looked at her hands, clasped before her on the table, and I saw that she was blinking back tears. “I did love it,” she said, very softly. She managed a smile. “I suppose we have that in common, you and I.”
I heard a sound behind me, the gentle thump of Aurélie’s handbag finally sliding to the floor. I was quiet, listening, but it was clear she hadn’t noticed. She and Cole were talking about yesterday’s math exam, which had gone poorly for him but beautifully for her, as far as I could tell.
I dropped my metal straw. “Oh. Excuse me,” I said, and ducked under the table. Aurélie’s purse was lying there in the crumbs, carelessly unzipped. Her wallet was a shiny bright red, a beacon. I flicked it open, palmed a hundred-euro bill, and surfaced with the handbag and the straw.
“Aurélie, your handbag fell,” I said, but her back was to me and she didn’t hear. I waved at Cole.
“Yeah,” he said, with a why-are-you-talking-to-me-when-I’m-with-a-girl look. Aurélie twisted around to look at me, which made her shirt cling in a distracting manner that I had to work hard to not notice.
“Your handbag,” I said. “It fell off the chair.”
“Oh,” Aurélie said, “oh, thank you,” and her smile was the most beautiful thing I’d seen in a while, but I was careful to maintain a neutral expression because she was Cole’s girlfriend, not mine.
I saw the way Aurélie’s eyes widened just slightly when she saw Nico, who didn’t notice.
Nico was still watching the family with the dog.
Was she strange looking? A little. Perhaps.
She was the most utilitarian-looking person I’d ever seen in my life, that was how I thought of her.
Nico kept her hair buzzed close to her skull and wore large glasses with dark frames that dominated her face.
She wore oversized clothing, and as far as I could tell owned no more than three or four shirts and the same number of pants. I’d never seen her in makeup.
“It was a dead end then?” I asked. “The guy in Copenhagen?”
“Probably,” Nico said.
“You’re not certain.” I had a feeling I often had when I talked with her, of vast mysteries opening up all around us.
“I’m not certain of anything. Look, I loved that painting. It kept me company in the evenings, when I was working and wished I could be at home with my children. It was nice to look up and see a beautiful thing. But . . .” She shrugged.
“But you’re a physicist,” I said, “and you’re saying that you can’t imagine how a painting could be a door.”
“Right,” she said. “On the other hand, I absolutely cannot explain how the accident happened, so clearly there are variables I don’t understand.”
3
Ari Soriano moved in a cloud of wild rumours.
“Someone told me her first husband was an assassin,” Cole told me, late at night in the library when the two of us and Obie were cramming for some exam or another.
I didn’t believe in studying until the night before exams. Cole had to study for weeks to make the bare minimum grades to stay at the school, and tonight he had dark circles under his eyes.
“Nah, they were both killers,” Obie said. “I heard she did like thirty years in an American prison.”