Chapter 16
SEQUOIA FALLS, NEW YORK
JUNE 11, 2022
AGE: 35
DESIREE WAS GRIPPING MY SHOULDERS AND SHAKING ME. “WHAT the hell is wrong with you?”
She’d changed into a suit in a pale stone hue. Everything behind her was a blur. “Just because you got the Memo doesn’t mean you need to flaunt it! You signed a legally binding document. Breaking it has cosmic, cataclysmic consequences.”
“Sorry.” I rubbed my eyes. I was back in her office, on the good old love seat. The space was coming into focus. How my head hurt. “I was... in my feelings. It’s hard for me to conceal anything from Geeta. I probably shouldn’t drink anymore when I’m blitz-tracking.”
“I could give a toss what you imbibe.” Desiree clenched her jaw, sat down next to me, and put her hands on my shoulders. “I specifically told you not to go back to 2009. Your work there was already done. But you were determined, so off you went. When Valerie gets wind of this violation...” Desiree let go of me and began pacing back and forth across the office, hand to her head.
I felt a vibration and looked down at my phone. A sad-face emoji was flashing on my home screen. Valerie, whoever she was, wasn’t the only one disappointed with me.
“What a fool I was, letting you waste our time and have your little champagne toast. And you thanked me, how? First, you had to bring that weird man into your optimized life.”
I remembered watching Gabe’s body slip down the sewer grate and felt a wave of worry. “What happened to Gabe? Did I hurt him?”
“You invited him in, and he had to be disinvited,” she murmured.
“I didn’t invite him anywhere!”
“You didn’t?” Desiree’s voice pulsed with accusation as she looked down at me. “I sure didn’t! Get with the program. He is not part of the program. Leave him well enough alone—in Pittsburgh. And then, to make matters worse, you went back, opened your big trap, and nearly ruined everything. Do you have any idea what such a revelation would have done?” Desiree was now inhaling and exhaling heavily, as if she were in labor.
“I was only trying to—”
“Look at you, trying to outwit the physical universe. The reason we had you sign the NDA is not because we at the Consortium are vindictive. It’s because we know things about the ways energy pathways interact. This is theoretical physics in action, Jenny! It’s no longer just theoretical! If you reveal too much information about the future in your past, it disrupts the flow, which could seriously impact our research.” She glared at me.
“You do realize I am a human being, not a guinea pig?”
“If only. Guinea pigs are cute creatures that can’t talk. I’ll put it another way: if you were to reveal to your friends that you had the Memo, you would be altering the course of human history.”
“Geeta and Leigh are just two people,” I reminded her. “It’s not like I went on the nightly news.”
“You need to get in line. It might be a lot to juggle in your little head, but remember, this is all temporary. On your thirty-sixth birthday, you will permanently latch on to your new life and you will never have to worry about anything ever again. You understand?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be a good soldier. Promise.”
“You’re not a soldier. You’re an explorer. Somewhere, out there, you’re meeting Alex. And you’re also opening your first storefront! And you’re at a squash tournament in Boston. You play doubles. You’re making the semifinals.”
“I play squash?” I was truly puzzled. “And I’m playing it as we speak?”
Desiree leaned against the fireplace. “Haven’t you ever heard of things happening in tandem? Or looked at a star and stopped to think how long it takes for the light to travel to earth and that what you are really seeing is that star in a past state, millions of years ago?”
“Sure, I think about that all the time,” I deadpanned.
“You, Jenny, are that star. You’re still burning, then and now. With all the additional information we’ve introduced to your reality, you’re in a very delicate state, spinning a chrysalis that could come undone if you’re not careful. Valerie, my supervisor, can explain it better. She wanted to have a word with you. She didn’t take kindly to your slipup.”
“How many of you were watching me?” I asked in horror.
“Just me, but I report everything to Valerie,” she said. “What was I supposed to do? I needed her help to get you the hell out of harm’s way. Only she knows how to do that chandelier trick.” Desiree motioned for me to get up.
Fear set in as Desiree and I trudged up a flight of stairs to Valerie’s office. Desiree had me wait outside at first, so I pulled an old magazine out of my bag, trying and failing to focus on a story about a pirate ship that had recently been discovered at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. There was a muffled altercation on the other side of the door. I tried to tune it out.
Desiree’s head finally poked out the doorway, cuckoo-clock style. “She’s ready.”
Valerie’s office was lined with plane windows that overlooked the quad. It featured its own science lab, with a fume hood, Bunsen burners, and test tubes arranged in an orderly fashion.
Valerie’s onyx-colored hair was styled in a bowl cut—the look was similar to Desiree’s but slicked in such a way that she resembled a Lego figure. She was sorting vials and mumbling to herself, something about “stupid ideas” and “geriatric wanderer.”
Heat rushed to my face.
“Just to be clear, you do understand that a nondisclosure means you don’t disclose, right?” Valerie said by way of greeting. “I know the directions can present challenges to those who have issues with authority.”
“I understand,” I said quietly.
“So you were simply doing as you pleased because you thought having a little heart-to-heart with your girlfriends before party time was more important than keeping the entire fucking universe aligned?”
I froze, too stunned to defend myself. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I lost sight of the rules.”
“Evidently.” Valerie pressed her lips together. “You put all of us in grave jeopardy when you don’t abide by the terms. The Consortium, yourself, Geeta too. I’m not overstating the facts. Do it for Geeta if nothing else. Do you want to hurt her?”
She let her final words hang in the air. My insides went cold. Of course I didn’t want to hurt Geeta. That would be the last thing I ever wanted to do.
“I hear you,” I said.
“It’s not that hard,” Valerie said. “Mouth shut, mind open. If you can’t hack it, now’s your chance to delete the app and go back to that sorry Pittsburgh existence of yours.”
“I can hack it,” I said. It surprised me how much I wanted to return to my alternate life.
Valerie stared at me, as if she was determining whether I was worth any extra breath. “I’ll see you at your ceremony,” she said, and walked out of the room.
“I know she can be a bit brusque,” Desiree said a moment later. “Don’t judge her too harshly. Valerie has been dealing with some terrible back pain.”
I wasn’t sure Valerie deserved any of Desiree’s excuses, but I knew better than to speak ill of her. Instead, I asked, “What is this ceremony she was talking about?”
“Your ceremony. It’s in a week.”
“So it’s my birthday party?”
“Of sorts. Until then, you will be zigzagging between two lives. And, at the end of this journey, you will accept your destiny. Everything will click into place and you will soar.” She pressed her palms together. “Every ending is also a beginning.”
Again, the questions began to swirl in my mind.
“And when I click into my new life, what happens to the old Jenny Green? The one in Pittsburgh, with Hal and Alice? Does that Jenny... die a violent death or...”
Desiree waved her hand in the air, her movements soft as smoke. “She transitions to her new, better life. There will be no trace of Jenny Green in Pittsburgh.”
“So I erase myself, effectively?” I said.
“You don’t erase, you adjust the dials. The pieces of your life will rearrange accordingly. That crew of yours will all still be there; they’ll just be there without you. They’ll have no memories to bog them down. You’ll be gone without a trace.”
“And what about Geeta?” I spluttered.
“Geeta? She’s got the Memo early in life, so you don’t have to worry about her branch points.” Desiree cocked her head, waiting for me to understand. “There’s only one Geeta who accepted her Memo when she was supposed to. We expect that she’s fully equipped to handle either version of you. Make sense?”
“You want me to be honest here?” I mumbled, but she either didn’t hear me or didn’t care.
“We’ll be running some tests on you between trips to check your vitals and quantify the impact, yada yada. This is an important data set. You may be the first, but remember there are others who we will be blitz-tracking after you. You’re our pioneer.”
“No pressure or anything.”
“Oh and one more thing: after the next blitz-track, you’ll need to return to Pittsburgh.”
“And do what?” I wondered how I would act upon seeing Hal now that I knew for sure that he had been cheating on me this entire time.
“You’ll go home and live your old life. Pretend nothing’s happened. Your prior existence should be more or less the same. There may be some QB disjunctions given the trouble you already got yourself into, but don’t mind them.”
“QB whatsits?”
“Qubit disjunctions. But let’s not dwell on them. The objective is to minimize them.”
“Minimize what?”
“The disjunctions!”
I felt like we were Abbott and Costello, doing a metaphysical “Who’s on First?” bit.
“But how can I minimize them if I don’t know what they are?”
Desiree fixed her gaze on the window. “When you jump between lives, you want to create as few disturbances as possible. If you don’t follow the laws, however, there will likely be some ripple effects. So I’d expect them if I were you. Just act like everything is normal. Where’s your phone? I need you to pull up the Pathetic tab.”
I did as told. “This is all real footage, mind you,” Desiree said as I cringed at the sight of a video of my best friends getting side-by-side massages at a tropical resort. The Turkish eye tattoo on Leigh’s left shoulder, which I had recently learned about via social media, told me this scene had taken place sometime in the last year. There was audio this time.
“She’s doing her own thing,” I heard Geeta say.
“But does she have to do it so slowly and so annoyingly?” asked Leigh. “She’s exhausting.”
“Cut her some slack,” Geeta said. “She’s had a lot of microtraumas.”
Microtraumas?
My heart went heavy as I scrolled down. There was a clip of Yelena, my former intern at the radio station, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. How had I not heard about that? Next up was Alice delivering an address about women’s empowerment at what looked like some fancy private club. “In our fast-paced, achievement-obsessed society, self-doubt runs rampant,” Alice said in the video. “There’s a woman I know, a woman I have tried to mentor, who once had everything going for her but might as well wear a sandwich board that says: ‘I Am So Lost I Don’t Even Realize I’m Wearing a Sandwich Board.’ It’s heartbreaking.”
“Is it working?” Desiree asked. I could barely nod in response. My hurt and envy levels were off the charts. “Good. Now pick a date. Anytime will do, just as long as it’s after your last journey.” I scrolled the dial to a random date, tapped the button on my flashing screen, and waited for the gates to my other life to swing open.