Multiversum (17 page)

Marco, on the other hand, had just woken up. A couple of hours' sleep was all he could afford. He hoisted himself back onto his wheelchair, and the first thing he thought of was Becker's video message. He had to warn Alex. But how?

He wheeled into the living room, the green remote control in his hand. He pushed a button and the wooden shutters started to rise. The sky was grey, and it looked like a typical Milanese winter's day. He went over to his computers and switched them on.

Once the computers had booted up, he noticed that the wi-fi signal was showing zero bars out of four: he couldn't connect to the internet.

‘What's going on?' Marco steered his wheelchair around to the far side of the desk, where the modem was located. He arched his back and tilted his head to one side to take a look. All of the lights on the modem were off, and when he tried to turn it off and on again, nothing happened. It was dead.

‘Damn it!' Marco exclaimed.

A gust of warm air enveloped Alex's body. He had been sitting cross-legged on Altona Beach for two days now.

His isolation had been interrupted by very few breaks. The previous day he had bought some sandwiches and a few bottles of water, and filling his backpack so that he wouldn't have to leave the beach at all. He needed to eliminate all external stimuli and immerse himself in a meditative state that, in his opinion, would provide the solution to the problem. So he was determined to devote as much time as necessary to meditating, even if it was by no means easy and, to tell the truth, even if he had no real idea of what he needed to do or what his objective was. But a new confidence seemed to guide his actions: the idea that every thing that happened, every act of his, was part of a larger plan.

When the moon started rising over the waves, casting a trail of milky light over the water straight towards him, Alex began to scan the sky with renewed focus.

In the now-black sky arching over the ocean, the constellation that he'd been waiting to glimpse was suddenly there, twinkling before his eyes. With a shape like an hourglass, Orion shone forth in the firmament. The belt, with its line of three stars, was there before him.

While Jenny was landing at Milan's Malpensa Airport, Alex had finally managed to find the key that she had spoken of. The vortex dragged his thoughts far away from that vision. It violently tore his mind away from his body, which toppled backwards onto the sand. It was like a journey through a dizzying succession of faces and landscapes. He heard an echoing chorus of cries, wails, weeping, and laughter … he felt the sensation of rocketing at the speed of light down a tunnel until everything disappeared. The deafening din ended all at once. Silence enveloped him.

All around him was blackness.

Where am I?

A few minutes went by. He could perceive nothing of his surroundings.

All of a sudden, there was a wave of heat, getting closer and closer, intolerably hot. He seemed to be using every muscle in his body to focus on what was before him, but no colour, no shape, nothing at all was clear to his mind's eye. In fact, he wasn't even
looking
anymore.

His first perception of reality was the sound of a bell. It came from far away. It rang several times, separated by short intervals. His mind was just getting used to the heat, while the first noises were starting to filter through from the outside.

Suddenly, Alex opened his eyes. He opened them wide. A blinding light made it impossible for him to see where he was. He tried to concentrate, but then his five senses all arrived at the same time. Alex began to feel his limbs, the movement of his arms in the surrounding space, as his surroundings began to take shape in front of him. Before his eyes, white tiles came into sharper focus. He began to smell the first odours, and he detected a number of voices in the distance.

One of these voices came closer and closer, until it finally aroused Alex's attention.

‘Are you going to get moving or not?'

Fully aware that he was inching his head to the left, Alex turned and saw a red-headed boy in a tracksuit. The boy was looking at him quizzically.

‘We've got philosophy: you want to get off your butt?'

Alex's eyes opened wide. He nodded yes, and then looked around.
I'm in a locker room!
He got to his feet and followed his classmate. As they went down the school's corridors, his mind was flooded with new information. As if he had just woken up from a coma, or had recovered his memory after a serious accident.

Alex walked through the halls, following the usual route to his classroom. He felt as if he'd known these corridors all his life. Just as naturally, he sat down at his desk at the back of the classroom. He did it all without thinking and yet, at the same time, he found it utterly amazing.

As the teacher shut the door behind her and greeted the students, Alex looked down at what he was wearing. He had on a grey tracksuit, running shoes, and a black T-shirt. On it was written
Parental Advisory
.

In his mind, a thought informed him that he had just finished PE. They'd played volleyball in the gym. Alex's team had lost, but he remembered clearly that he'd blocked a couple of smashes by a classmate named Stefano. He also remembered that he didn't like Stefano one bit.

His eyes travelled at once to his rival, just as the philosophy teacher was asking a girl in the class to read a passage from their textbook. Stefano turned around to shoot him a glare, as if to challenge him.

I … remember that guy! We got in a fight in the corridor, and the hall monitor had to pull us apart …

Alex kept his eyes fixed on his classmate while his memory patiently fished up fragments of this apparently unknown world.

He tried to sift through his past in search of other details of a life that, evidently, was only his in part.

There was no trace of Marco.

Maybe he had never entered the video-game tournament and the two of them had never met. Or maybe there had never been a tournament in the first place. But his parents were both there in his memories, and they seemed to have led mostly similar lives. He still lived on Viale Lombardia, he still played the same sports — basketball and tennis — and after a quick check of his musical tastes, he realised that there wasn't such a huge difference between the life of his alter ego and his own.

Aside from Marco, then, many aspects of this parallel dimension were similar, if not identical, to his original dimension.

But there was a fundamental difference, and Alex knew exactly what it was.

If his journey had taken him to the right place, Jenny was alive and healthy in this reality.

While Alex was familiarising himself with his alternative world, Jenny was clearing customs at Malpensa Airport.

22

Alex
…

He heard the voice entering his head all of a sudden, as the clock on the classroom wall showed the time was four minutes to one. The last period was almost over. Jenny's voice was so clear and immediate, so close …

I hear you. I'm here, Jenny. I'm here!

I'm shaking all over …

Where are you?

In Milan. I just left the airport a little while ago, I took a train that'll take me to the city centre.

I know the one. It's a line that connects with the metro. You'll get to Cadorna station. Get off there. I'll be waiting for you. I get out of school in a few minutes, and I'll come to meet you.

Will we recognise each other?

I'm sure we will.

As they communicated in thought, Alex went on staring at the clock. The teacher turned to look at him every so often, frowning as she noticed his complete lack of attention. But the Alex in that dimension had an A– average in philosophy. She could allow him one day of slacking off.
He must be in love
, thought his teacher. She wasn't far off the mark.

As soon as he got out of the building, Alex broke into a run. He ran without stopping until he reached the Loreto metro station. He boarded the first carriage on a green-line train. On the train, his thoughts were tangled in confusion. He was about to meet the girl who had lived in his thoughts for as far back as he could remember.

During the metro ride, something strange happened.

There was a curly-haired guy leaning against the door of the carriage, with an Isaac Asimov book in his hands. When he looked up, he gave Alex a fierce, hostile look for no apparent reason.
People in this world are still the same: they glare at each other for no good reason
, he mused. After that, out of nowhere, he found himself imagining the book falling out of the guy's hands. A couple of seconds later, the guy actually did drop his novel on the floor. Then he shook his head, astonished at what he'd done, bent over to pick it up, and, with a quizzical look, went back to reading.

Alex got off the metro at Cadorna and took the escalator upstairs to the main station. Gripping the rubber handrail as he rode up, he noticed that two girls standing ahead of him were having a spirited argument about a fairly meaningless topic: which club to go to that Saturday night. Alex shut his eyes and imagined the two girls embracing. A moment later, the two girls turned, wrapped their arms around each other and then, abruptly, moved away from one another.

Alex heard one of the girls ask: ‘Why did you do that?'

The other girl shrugged her shoulders, with a look that told her friend she had no idea what had just happened.

Did that really happen or did I just think it?
Alex asked himself. He couldn't figure out whether what was going on around him was real, or might instead be nothing more than something reconstructed by his mind, a false memory of something that had never actually taken place.

When he found himself looking up at the LCD signboards that indicated the arriving and departing trains, his heart began to pound in his chest. The train from Malpensa was scheduled for 1.30 p.m. That was only ten minutes away.

Alex headed for the platform. Everything around him seemed quite similar to the reality from which he had just come. The station was pretty crowded, with dozens and dozens of people moving at the frantic pace of the city.

Suddenly a man in his mid fifties, who was shoving his way through the crowd, tripped and slammed into Alex, only to continue on his way without so much as a word of apology. A few seconds after that, Alex instinctively shut his eyes and saw the same man inviting a prostitute into his car, paying her, and watching as she unzipped his pants. Alex did his best to expel that vision immediately from his mind.

‘What on earth is happening?!' he exclaimed as his eyes followed the man. His mind was playing nasty tricks on him, and he was no longer able to distinguish between imagination and reality.

A glance at the station clock told him that the train would be pulling up in no more than a minute or two.

Sitting by the window, Jenny looked at her mobile phone, which she had turned off as a precaution, and thought about her mother. She must be horribly worried about her. She was reminded of her mother's theories about the spiritual plane of life; about the plans of destiny, which left no room for mere coincidence. There was a higher reason behind every chance encounter, her mother often said, especially the ones that might seem to be mere strokes of luck. All the same, Jenny was pretty sure that her mother's beliefs wouldn't be taken into consideration as extenuating circumstances the minute she found out that her daughter had run away to Italy.

Jenny turned to the seats on her left and saw a woman slap a little boy. The woman appeared to be furious at the child.

‘Don't you dare start crying!' she shrieked into his face.

Jenny exchanged a glance with the little boy, who had twisted his head to the right, and his eyes met hers.

‘Mamma, who was that lady with Papà yesterday?'

‘Who are you talking about?'

‘When you were at work … Papà took me to the soccer field and then he left with a blond lady. I even saw them kissing. Who is she?'

‘What are you talking about? Don't make up stories! And now shut up and finish your dinner.'

Jenny shook her head and rubbed her eyes as a shudder ran through her, paralysing her.

‘What …' she started to say aloud, and then caught herself in time.

This hadn't been a fantasy or an odd thought. She'd seen it. That scene had really taken place: she could feel it, she was sure of it. As if that boy had wanted to show her something.

What the hell is happening to me?

The metallic voice of the train's loudspeaker announced, first in Italian and then in English, that they were about to pull in to Cadorna station.

Her emotions were rising at a dizzying rate. It wasn't even comparable to what she had felt on Altona Pier, when a thousand doubts were still crowding her mind. Now she was much closer, closer than she'd ever been before. The meeting that she'd been anticipating for the last four years.

Or maybe she'd been waiting for this moment all her life.