An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes (2 page)

“Want to see your room?” his father asks, adjusting those trendy glasses again.

Archie scratches the back of his head. “Not really.”

Back in his father's apartment, where the scent of curry seeps through the thin walls from the hallway and the raccoons scheme outside in the darkness, Archie lies on his bed. He stares at the tiny stalactites on the spackled ceiling, seeking patterns in vain. He curses the fact that it is not yet Monday and sits up.

He digs his laptop out of his bag, pulls it onto his lap, and powers it on.

Neither Sam nor Dante are online. But Mari is.

Archie clicks her name. He types a message but deletes it. He types another message but deletes it as well.

He doesn't know what to say, only that he wants to say something.

He sets the computer aside, stands, stretches, and walks over to the only window in his room. It offers a less than stimulating view of the parking lot. He stares at the motionless cars reflecting the sickly orange light of the building's security lamp.

Two more days.

He sighs and returns to the bed, sitting up with his back pressed against the wall. He pulls his laptop back onto his lap.

He stares at Mari's name in his list of online contacts. He wonders what she's doing right now. He wonders what she's wearing.

Shaking off the pervy thought, he pulls up World of Warcraft. Oddly enough, he doesn't really feel like running around in an imaginary land completing quests. His heart's just not in it. Still, he clicks on the option to create a new character.

Usually Archie plays mages. He loves their knowledge, their mastery of the arcane. The badassery of shooting fire out of his hands. Tonight, though, he decides to create a warrior. He maxes out the height and musculature options. He gives this warrior dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. Scars. Tattoos. He names him Évariste, after a brilliant mathematician who died at the age of twenty fighting in a duel over the woman he loved.

He plays for an hour, low-level quests, enough to become the character, to feel a bit Évaristian himself. Exiting the game, Archie clicks on Mari's name to bring up the message box.

And before he finds the rights words, the effect dissipates. He becomes painfully self-conscious of the fact that in real life he is not a seven-foot tall, muscular, dark-skinned warrior. He is Archie. Skinny, pale, awkward Archie.

He shuts his laptop and decides he will make his move later. Tomorrow. Or Monday. Definitely before he moves into his father's new house.

He places the computer back into his bag and grabs a notebook, a pencil, his graphing calculator, and his calculus book. He opens to the dog-eared page marking the section on linear approximations and tangent planes, and he positions the book on his lap.

His shoulders relax.

Here is the world, quantifiable and predictable.

Archie is eating sushi at the kitchen counter. It is not his favorite food by a long shot, but he will eat it because it is his mom's favorite. She stands on the opposite side of the counter, a glass of red wine in hand, her Sunday evening sacrament.

“So how was your weekend?” she asks and then takes a sip.

“You mean besides your looming, unmotherly betrayal?” he asks.

“Yes. Besides that.” She sets down her glass and uses her chopsticks to steal a piece of sushi from Archie's plate.

“Meh.”

A silence settles between them as she chews. Outside, an ice cream truck's jingle approaches and recedes.

“And the new place?” she asks.

“Not so new,” Archie says.

“I never thought I'd see the day that man would buy a fixer-upper. When we first moved in together, the power went out. He turned to me and said, ‘I'll take care of it,' real masculine-like, and then disappeared into the basement. I figure, okay, he's going to the circuit breaker.”

“Makes sense. Probably a tripped fuse, right?”

She nods. “Only, he was gone for half an hour. So finally I went downstairs, worried that maybe he electrocuted himself to death. But you know what he was doing?”

Archie shakes his head.

“He was gazing at the water heater, flashlight in one hand, stroking his mustache with the other. So I put my hands on his shoulders, marched him over to the circuit breaker, showed him the tripped fuse, and then flipped it. Bam. The power was restored. And you know what he said to me?”

“What?” Archie asks.

“‘Witchcraft.'” She laughs more at the memory than the objective humor of his father's comment. She picks up her wine glass again. “Doesn't that sound like something you'd say, sweetie?”

Archie takes a deep breath as he drowns a piece of sushi in soy sauce. “No offense, Mom, but I'd rather not talk about Dad—unless it's about how you've decided that I shouldn't move in with him.”

She crosses her arms and shoots him a look. He imagines this is the same glare she must use to break down lying witnesses in the courtroom. “We're not having this conversation again.”

“I can give you a thousand reasons this is a terrible idea,” he says anyway.

She sighs. “It will be good for you. For all of us. For the last year—ever since the divorce—you've been treating your dad like a complete stranger.”

“He
is
a stranger,” Archie says.

“He really isn't, sweetie. He may be . . . a little different than you're used to. But he's still your dad. He's still the same person.” His mom pauses for a moment and then adds, “And trust me, you don't want to go off to college without working through this. You'll regret it for the rest of your life.”

Archie looks down. “There's nothing to work through.”

Her eyes soften. Uncrossing her arms, she tousles Archie's hair. He pretends to pull away, to dislike it. But inside it makes him feel light and warm.

“You know, I really don't get you sometimes,” she says.

“Join the club,” says Archie.

“I mean it.”

“Me too.”

“You're the most intelligent immature person I've ever known,” she says. “So if you don't want to talk about your father, what do you want to talk about?”

“I don't know,” he says. But he does: Mari.

He blushes just thinking of her. It does not escape his mom's notice. She watches him squirm for a moment.

“Ooh—a girl,” she says, leaning her elbows onto the counter. “Who is she?”

“Nobody.”

“Ha. Spill.”

“Fine,” Archie admits, pushing around the last grains of rice on his plate. “But she's nobody you know.”

“Sure. What's she like?”

“Smart,” he says, meeting her eyes. “She's a writer. Her stories—they're so good, Mom. Brilliant. I don't know how she comes up with all of it. There's like all this depth to her mind.”

“Wonderful! I knew I raised you to appreciate intelligent women. What else?”

“She's beautiful,” Archie says. “Not, like, conventionally pretty. I mean—she's not ugly—just—I don't know. Not like all super-model skinny and blonde. Anyways, I think she's hot.” He hates the fact he can't find the right words.

“So what's the deal? Are you two an item yet?”

Archie lets out a sarcastic laugh. He drops his eyes back to his plate. “Ha. No.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs. “I don't think she knows I like her.”

“So tell her.”

He crosses his arms. “It's not that easy.”

“Sure it is. As a man of logic, I expect you to see that.”

“Maybe for some people. But not for me. Besides, I don't think she likes me like that.”

“Well, you'll never know if you don't make a move. What's the worst that can happen?”

The severe awkwardness of rejection leads to the end of our gaming nights,
he thinks. He does not say it, though, for fear of giving too much away. If his mom found out it was Mari, she'd probably end up sharing his secret the next time they were all in the same room. Maybe it was a requirement of the profession, but the woman was neither indirect nor shy.

They finish the rest of their meal without talking any further about his father or his crush, and then Archie clears the table. He dumps the empty containers into the garbage, ties off the trash bag, and carries it outside, trying not to visualize the rate of change in his life as a steeply sloped graph.

He focuses instead on tasting the air. It is humid and sweet but with the faintest hint of autumn. True back-to-school weather. The sunset is a swath of orange across the horizon. The ice cream truck's jingle lilts through the neighborhood. A dog barks in the distance.

Archie drops the garbage in the trashcan at the side of the house and then spots a football in the grass. The neighbor's kid must have tossed it over the fence by accident.

He walks over to it and drops down into a three-point stance. He surveys the lawn, conjuring teammates, a packed stadium, and a scoreboard. His team is down by three.

A field goal will tie the game. But he wants to win. He winks at Mari in the stands, and then glances at the coach who signals a play that Archie shakes off.

“Hut . . . hut . . . Blue 42 . . . hike!” he calls.

Archie hikes the ball to himself and then drops back into the pocket. He scans the field for open receivers, finally locates one, and launches a wobbly spiral into the sky.

The ball disappears over the fence.

Finally: Dungeons & Dragons night. The grid-based map is laid out across the center of Mari's kitchen table. The players' figures stand in the exact same spots as they did at the close of last week's session. Polyhedral dice wait to be wielded like weapons. Mari is set up at the head of the table. Her tri-fold cardboard shield conceals the notes she uses to run the game from everyone else's view.

Everything is in place.

Except there are two empty chairs and two missing players: Sam and Sarah.

They had been late before—usually because of Sarah—but never this late.

Archie checks his phone to see if either has texted him back yet. Negative.

Mari jots something down in her notebook, pressing her pen into the page with more ferocity than is probably required.

Dante rises and goes to stand at the sliding glass door, turning his giant back to Archie and Mari. He crosses his arms over his broad chest and silently stares into the early evening.

Mari lets out an exasperated breath. “Where the hell are they?”

“I'm sure they'll be here soon,” Archie says. “Want to play something else while we wait? Settlers
of Catan? Some who's-got-wood jokes might cheer us all up.” Archie knows it's one of Mari's favorite games.

Nobody answers him.

They sink back into silence. Archie picks up his mage figurine and uses it to kick over Dante's warrior. He rolls his twenty-sided die a few times. He flicks a balled up bit of paper at Mari. It lands in her hair. He laughs. She does not. She brushes it out while muttering something under her breath that sounds like it's in a different language.

“You know, just between the three of us, I don't get what he sees in her,” Archie says. When nobody speaks, he continues the conversation on his own. “I mean, yeah, she's pretty and cool and all that. But I think she's kind of a terrible person. For one, even after all these years, I get the feeling she doesn't like playing this game with us. She definitely doesn't like me. Doesn't even say hi when I run into her at school. Also, she smokes. Who smokes anymore? Ugh. And you know Sam only does because of her.”

“He probably just doesn't want to be alone,” Dante says, still turned away from them. “But I like Sarah.”

“That doesn't count. You like everyone, D,” Archie says. “But personally, I think Sam needs to dump her. You ever notice that he actually smiles and laughs when she's not around? He just seems, I don't know, lighter. She's like this parasite that just sits on his shoulder, dragging him down and draining him of all happiness—don't tell him I said that.” Archie checks his phone again. “Still nothing. Let's just play with the three of us.”

Mari shoots him a look as if he knows nothing about anything. “We're in the middle of a story, Arch. You need to respect the narrative. We can't just have two characters suddenly disappear.”

“How difficult would that be?” Archie asks. “Let's just say they were kidnapped by goblins overnight. We look around for a bit and can't find them, so we continue on our quest and hope they turn up eventually. If they don't, then too bad, it was nice knowing them. Sayonara. Bam. Problem solved.”

Mari shakes her head. “You'd still die. I designed this quest for a complete adventuring party of four. With no healer and no rogue there's not a chance you two would survive.”

It is clear to Archie that this is not the night to profess his feelings to Mari. Perhaps it is Sam and Sarah's no-show, or perhaps it is her time of the month. Whatever the case, he keeps his mouth shut and goes back to rolling his die. It rattles across the table over and over again. He tries to keep track of the numbers he's rolling, appreciating the dependability of probability—on a long enough timeline, everything falls back into place.

He considers the game pieces that have transformed Mari's dining table into their shared fantasy world nearly every Monday since the sixth grade. He gets the sense they're losing this, that he is losing them. With the impending move at the end of the week and college looming at the end of the year, he is not confident that things will fall back into place.

He gazes at what he can see of Mari as she continues writing behind the shield. Her thick black curls. Smooth brown skin. The startling green eyes behind her glasses that cause hope to bloom in him like a supernova.