1 #8
So you got back up on the platform.
Yeah. I did.
What were you thinking about?
You know what I was thinking? I was thinking that I maybe hadn’t been the best husband, and that going after my wife was the absolute least I could do.
In what ways were you a bad husband?
That’s not the word I used.
Explain what you meant.
Why? Is this punishment, or interrogation?
Let the record show that the subject is resisting interrogation.
Jesus, Ibari, I’m not resisting interrogation.
Okay. Nico and I, we had very similar careers.
We made about the same amount of money, working the same number of hours, doing similar projects.
We’d met in the same department. But when we had kids, she did all the parenting. That’s just the way it played out.
Why is that?
She was better at it than me. Also, if we can be candid here, the work I was doing was more important. I didn’t think that putting the kids to bed was necessarily the best use of my time.
Let’s return to the experiment. So you got up on the platform.
Yeah. I got up on the platform. I watched Len’s face as he ran the sequence.
He was sweating. He said, “I’m going to count you down from three,” and I said, “Just push the fucking button.” He stared at me, and then I was standing on the B platform, across the room, and he was staring at the empty A platform where I’d just been.
I thought, Okay, it worked. It worked. There’s hope.
But then he looked at me, and his face went slack, just this shocked expression.
I wasn’t alone on the B platform. There was someone crowded next to me.
The other you.
The other me.
5
After the interview was done I went to the employee lounge, which looked a lot like the teachers’ lounge at the college in Fillmore, with scuffed wood floors and mismatched chairs.
There was something here that I couldn’t quite grasp when I considered the furnishings, some logic to the room that evaded understanding.
I felt drained and shaken. There were other people here, a few, working quietly, and that was the sole reason why I didn’t sit with my head in my hands.
What I wanted was to go home and weep, because the inexplicability and mystery of the accident at UCLA felt like horror to me, and whatever had happened to Nico, it was difficult to believe that she was ever coming back.
Service protocol in difficult or complicated cases is to interview the same subject several times, retreading the same ground with different interrogators.
After speaking with Nico’s husband, I very much didn’t want to speak with his double.
But at least the double had been interviewed already, so I spent some time reading three previous transcripts, stalling in the guise of preparation.
This other Kareem Fayed, the man from elsewhere, relayed a very strange story that had remained perfectly consistent from one interview to the next.
He talked about a version of the world where the State didn’t exist. He had a story about civil war, about terrorism and bombings, a coup d’état that brought down the United States, the country fragmenting into multiple small nations and city-states with ever-shifting borders and countless combatants, militias battling for control across the former nation.
It was a fascinating alternate reality to consider, but as I read through the three previous transcripts, I sensed an increasing distance and disinterest on the part of the interviewers.
The man’s stories were consistent from interview to interview, but the problem was that there was no way at all to verify anything he said.
Still, his story lined up with Nico’s husband’s in a way that couldn’t be ignored.
This Kareem had thrown a party, and at a certain point in the evening, doubles of two of his friends had appeared.
Which friends? Saraya. There were two of her at his party.
Also Gloria, the friend everyone worried about.
Why did everyone worry about her? Because she’d survived a suicide bombing, after which she was never the same.
There had been two of her at the party, just briefly, but one of the two Glorias had said her name was Nico. My breath caught in my throat.
This was where my friend had gone, then.
She had disappeared from an experiment, and appeared at a party, in some dream-sequence version of the world where almost everything was different.
I hated everything about this case. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and then went downstairs to the room where the other Kareem Fayed was waiting.
He’d been placed in Studio Three, my favourite of the interrogation rooms. It looked like the waiting room at a high-end spa.
Floor, walls, and ceiling were white. There were two white sofas, a single tropical plant, and absolutely nothing else.
The featurelessness of it was restful to me.
Every time I came in here, I was struck by a desire to throw away all my possessions and paint every interior surface of my home stark white.
The man I was here to interview looked exhausted and folded in on himself, arms crossed. He’d been staring at the floor, but he looked up as I came in.
I’d expected a carbon copy of my friend’s husband, but as I entered, I saw that that wasn’t quite the situation.
There were surface differences—his haircut was different from his counterpart’s, he was four or five kilograms lighter and wearing a green silk shirt that I couldn’t imagine Nico’s husband wearing, but it wasn’t just that.
I had a sense that I was looking at a fundamentally different person.
Yet their faces were nearly identical. I took a seat quickly to hide my vertigo.
“Kareem,” I said.
“Yes.” He spoke in the voice of the Kareem I knew, Nico’s husband. It was best, I decided, to pretend that this man was an identical twin with amnesia. Otherwise the situation was too unnerving to contemplate.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“I know you.” He was staring intently at me.
“I’m sure we’ve never met.” But I felt my breath catch in my throat. If there were two Kareem Fayeds, did it not stand to reason that there were two Ibari Wakers? “Wait,” I said. “Tell me more about that.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I wasn’t . . .” But words fell short when I tried to say aloud what I was thinking.
He flinched. “Of course,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t you. That was someone in the other place.”
“I’m going to ask you about that other place in a moment, but in the meantime, could you tell me more about .
. . this other person? The person who looks like me?
” This possibly wasn’t a strictly relevant line of questioning, but on the other hand, who was to say what was relevant?
There had never been another case like this, ever.
“About the other you? I only met her once. She was Gloria’s friend. She looked like you,” Kareem said. “But she had this tattoo.” He touched his hand to the back of his left wrist.
“What kind of tattoo?”
“It said, TRUE DILIGENCE. Kind of uneven looking.”
I took a deep breath. “What do you know about her?”
“I don’t know you at all,” Kareem said. “Please don’t think I’m implying anything, but . . .”
“But?”
“But this other person, Gloria’s friend Ari, she’d just gotten out of prison. That’s where she got the tattoo.”
I stared at him. What was the most illegal thing I’d ever done? Snuck into a college donors lounge with my broken glasses?
“I’ve never even been arrested,” I said.
“Well, she had. She said she served eighteen years.”
“Murder?” I couldn’t imagine a sentence of that length for any other crime.
“Either murder or attempted murder, I wasn’t clear which it was. I’m sorry, please don’t think . . . I’m not implying that that’s you.”
“I understand. Did she give you any other details?”
“She said she took out a contract on her cousin.”
I drew a long breath. I had only one cousin, and I’d always thought of Anton as something closer to a brother. My watch vibrated softly on my wrist. I knew what the screen would say, so I pretended I hadn’t noticed.
“Did she say why?” I was in a danger zone, but it was impossible to leave the room.
“No. We weren’t . . . I wasn’t friends with her. I just met her at the party. We had one conversation. She was Gloria’s roommate. Gloria had told me about her, but the party was the first time we met.”
“Tell me about the party,” I said.
“The one thing I wanted to do at the party was to talk to Gloria,” he said. “I texted her that day, but we just . . . I didn’t. I was going to, and then it didn’t happen.”
“What were you going to talk to her about?”
“She was pregnant.” His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m very tired. I was just, I was so excited to be a father.”
“I’m sorry. That must make it very difficult to be here.”
“I’d been reading everything I could about it,” he said, “since she told me. Parenting blogs, books, everything. We were going to talk at the party, but . . .” He looked at the floor.
“Tell me why you decided to throw the party,” I said.
He swallowed hard, and nodded. “Well, there’d been a war. I don’t know if it happened here. The war that broke the country apart.”
“That broke the country apart?” It was a fascinating idea. The State was indivisible.
“Well, no country lasts forever,” he said. “That’s what we told ourselves, anyway, when we were trying to come to grips with the whole thing. Anyway, the party was to celebrate the end of the Los Angeles curfew.”
My watch buzzed again, and I glanced down to see the single word in red: RECUSE. My boss was observing the interview.
“Excuse me,” I said, and left him alone in the room. As I stepped out into the hall, where Alberto was waiting, I remembered: Gloria was Nico’s middle name.
“What is this?” I asked Alberto quietly. “Is there some kind of other world?”
“It would seem so,” he said. “But no conclusions can be made yet.”