Multiversum (18 page)

23

I'm here, Jenny
, thought Alex as the train rumbled into the station.

I'm pulling in … I'm scared I'm going to faint, I'm scared I won't be able to handle the emotion of it all. Can you take a look around, while we're talking?

Yes … I can see people getting out of the train. My heart is pounding like crazy
.

So is mine: it's about to explode. I just got out. I'm in the middle of the train. Come towards me!

Alex walked hesitantly for a few metres. Then he quickened his pace as, one by one, he examined the faces that came sweeping past his on the platform. Jenny did the same. She made an effort to clear her mind and focused on her search for that face. The photo on the website of that basketball team had imprinted itself on her mind. She'd have recognised it in a crowd of a million people.

Alex's imagination flew for an instant to Jenny's body as he had stumbled upon it during his first mental journey across the Multiverse. It was an amazing sight, but he hastily put it out of his thoughts.

At last, Jenny glimpsed Alex's blond head of hair through the crowd. It was him: she'd dreamed of him and she'd already seen him so many times.

There he was.

His eyes met hers for the first time. They recognised each other from a good twenty metres away. For a few seconds, they were frozen to the spot, looking at each other.

Inside them, they felt the fears, anxieties, and doubts that had tormented their souls for four years.

Then, the excitement and joy of seeing the end to a search that had seemed endless. Suddenly they started to run towards each other, as if there were no one on that platform but the two of them. As if nothing else on that planet was worth living for. Neither of them wanted to risk losing sight of the person they'd searched for all their lives, the person for whom they'd been forced to question their own sanity, the reason they were separated from the rest of the world.

‘Alex!' Jenny shouted, bursting into tears and throwing herself into his arms. A shiver went down her spine at the instant their bodies touched.

‘Jenny …' Alex whispered.

He clutched her to him, the words choking his throat in a burst of emotion. A jolt ran through his body. A wave of heat swept over him as he caressed her hair, so silky, so smooth. Jenny lay her head on his shoulder.

Then, suddenly, everything around them seemed to stop.

The frantic whirl of the station came to a standstill, as if every person there had simultaneously forgotten where they were going. A young woman dropped her wallet and looked at it lying there on the ground, as if she had fallen under a spell. Jenny and Alex's embrace seemed to have unleashed an undefinable energy, a wave that had washed over every single person in the vicinity. A little girl with a smile on her face came up to Alex and tugged on his jacket.

‘Who are you?' she asked him, as her mother hurried over to grab her.

No one appeared to know what was happening, but it was clear to everyone that something had altered the normal equilibrium of reality at that exact instant, at that precise moment.

As Alex and Jenny embraced, holding each other tight, a dazzling light shone from where they were united, reflecting off the triskelion and radiating a spark that illuminated and blurred the outlines of their surroundings. Clinging to each other at the centre of that explosion of light, Alex and Jenny could only sense the vibration that they were emanating, a vibration that was spreading to every person in the train station.

Many people put their hands up to their faces, as if to protect their eyes. Others stood motionless, eyes closed and mouths paralysed in an expression of astonishment. Everyone forgot at the same instant why they were there.

Alex and Jenny had broken through the space-time barriers, and were finally together.

It seemed like the end of their journey, but it was only the beginning.

‘Please tell me that your internet works.'

Marco's voice betrayed his serious concern. He was seated in his electric wheelchair, with a can of Coke in one hand, his mobile phone lying flat on the desk, and his bluetooth headset inside his right ear. His phone's screen showed the name of the guy he was talking to: Ricky Horses. Two years older than Marco, Ricky was also an expert hacker, and Marco had shared a great deal of his computer experience with him. They trusted each other, ever since the time when together they'd managed to worm their way into the data network of a major mobile-telecommunications corporation. There was a sort of unspoken pact between the two of them:
I won't play any tricks on you, and you won't play any on me.

‘No,' Ricky replied. ‘I've been trying since this morning. And it doesn't seem to be an isolated problem.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Earlier, I was at the bank and none of the ATMs worked. And that branch was on the other side of the city from my apartment.'

‘Damn it … what the hell is going on here?' Marco sat there staring into space, with Professor Becker's words whirling continuously through his head.
The Multiverse is about to be destroyed. The last days are here.
‘Well, give me a call if you hear anything, okay?'

‘Sure, Marco. Do you need anything? In your condition …'

‘I'm fine. I don't need anything, thanks. All I need is the damn internet to start working again.'

Alex and Jenny left the station and started walking at a brisk pace, hand in hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For both of them, that contact signified the certainty that what they were experiencing was real and not the product of their imagination. More than any word, more than any possible explanation, it was their intertwined fingers that communicated this to them.

Suddenly Alex turned to Jenny and looked at her intensely. ‘I've been waiting for so long to be able to look you in the eye … without being afraid that your image would slip away, without waking up again in my own world every time.'

Jenny smiled. Her eyes were glistening. She laid a hand on his face, touching his features. ‘I just thought I'd gone crazy. Now I don't even care if I am. If this is what it feels like to be crazy, I'm fine with it.'

They stood there in silence for a few seconds. The city around them had regained its usual frenzy, but something from that magic moment of their first contact still remained. An atmosphere, a buzz that kept them united as if they were a single entity, as if they were the core of a dimension that belonged to them and them alone.

‘I don't know what our lives will be like now …' Alex thought out loud. ‘I don't know what we ought to expect.'

‘Let's not expect anything. Let's just be together. That's all I wanted — I don't care about anything else.'

Alex smiled, as if agreeing with Jenny's words. He took her hand, and together they walked out into the same world.

It was strange to move through this alternative Milan. Most of the streets seemed identical, but when he saw certain buildings, Alex wondered whether he'd seen them in his world or whether they were the product of a different course of events.

‘But … you speak Italian. Why is that?' Alex asked as they crossed an intersection.

‘My mum was born and raised in Rome. She's been speaking Italian to me since I was a baby.'

‘Have you ever been to Italy before now?'

‘I … I don't know. I can't remember. But I do know that it feels like I've been talking to you all my life.'

‘It's just incredible, the streets look the same … but I've never seen that building before,' said Alex, pointing to a skyscraper in the distance. It was in the shape of an oblong C, with a breathtaking expanse of glass that was like a giant mirror reflecting the surrounding cityscape. It was much taller than any of the buildings that Alex was used to seeing in the Milan he lived in.

‘What do you mean? This is your city.'

‘Not exactly. Now I'm going to have to explain it all to you. It might seem crazy: I refused to believe it at first.'

‘What are you talking about? To me, it all seems crazy already. I've travelled halfway around the world to —'

‘I live in a parallel dimension to this one.'

Alex told Jenny everything he knew about the Multiverse, based on the theories of Marco and Professor Becker. He realised he might seem like a lunatic in her eyes, but he had no choice. And anyway, in the past twenty-four hours he'd started to pay less attention to what had been, until only recently, the boundary between normality and madness.

‘Alex, it's already hard for me to accept … all this.' Jenny waved her arms to indicate the street, the buildings, everything around them. ‘But what you're saying doesn't make any sense to me, I —'

‘I know: it's just as crazy to me. The point is that this craziness is starting to make sense, especially because it's brought me here to you. Jenny, I believe we can travel through the dimensions of the Multiverse. I believe we're special, and a different fate is written in our lives. Our mind … is the key.'

‘Wait … what did you just say?'

‘Our mind is the key.'

Jenny had heard those words before. She couldn't say where or when, but they were part of her past. All at once she thought back to the time she had woken up in what seemed to be her living room, where a woman who seemed to be her mother had told her that her father was dead. Then she thought back to the class with a teacher she'd never seen before and a room full of classmates she didn't know. Last of all, she remembered the images from the dream she'd had in the plane, when she'd found herself back at her grandparents' house, and both of them were alive. Those were such vivid experiences that it was impossible to distinguish her dreams from reality. Was that what Alex was talking about?

‘Yes,' he replied. He'd received the question that had been formulated only in Jenny's thoughts. For a moment, she seemed astonished. Then the clarity of Alex's thoughts, his confidence and conviction, began to spread into her mind, like light suddenly filtering down through a window. He realised this and went on talking.

‘I don't think we have much time left,' he said, coming straight to the point, as they went on walking towards Corso Venezia. ‘I can't tell you exactly why, and it's not easy to explain how I know this. But we're clearly in great danger.'

Jenny looked worried. ‘Then who are we? Why is all this happening to us?'

‘I don't know. All I know is that we have to find Memoria before it's too late … but I don't even know what it is. Or where it is.'

‘Memoria?'

‘You've never heard of this place, have you?' asked Alex.

Jenny stopped walking and let go of his hand. He turned to her, and his gaze met her eyes, which were filled with anxiety. ‘Alex, I'm starting to feel uneasy about this situation. I'm scared. And I have no idea what on earth you're talking about. Too late for what?'

He went over to her, ran his hand over her hair, and then held out both arms, letting her take his hands. ‘Jenny, I don't know either, but it's obvious that we can't go on pretending nothing is happening. Did you see what happened in that station?'

‘Yes,' she replied, her eyes shining as she looked into the eyes of the boy she'd dreamed of for so long. She'd doubted he was real; she'd been afraid that she was insane. He'd never stopped searching for her, and now he was asking her for one more act of unconditional faith. ‘It was as if time stood still. Something was created there … an energy of some kind.'

‘We're not crazy, though anyone listening to us would think so. But it's all true.'

‘But even if we accept that you live in a parallel dimension … how did you get here?'

‘With my mind. It's not my body that moves. I can't really explain it … It's like closing your eyes in one dimension and then passing through a tunnel connecting two worlds, a sort of vortex, and then waking up in another reality. When you open your eyes again, you're inside your alter ego. That's what it felt like to me. I woke up in a locker room in my school, but in your reality. Maybe someday you'll be able to do it, too …'

Jenny recalled the unfamiliar portrait, the room full of classmates she'd never seen, and her grandparents' house, all in quick succession. ‘Maybe I already can.'

The front gate to the public gardens of Porta Venezia was wide open. They decided to go in. A woman in a fur coat, who was walking a small poodle on a leash, exchanged a glance with them as they entered. Jenny's eyes wandered down the tree-lined path that meandered into the heart of the park. On the left was a row of benches, a couple of which were empty. Hand in hand, they strolled over to the first free bench and sat down.

Both of them could sense the other's thoughts, just as it had always been in their years of telepathic communication. Neither of them had to open their mouth in order to speak. But for Alex it was magnificent to finally hear the sound of Jenny's real voice, so delicate and gentle.