Multiversum (2 page)

What her parents didn't know, and had never been told, was what happened every time that Jenny fainted.

3

The school doctor gave Alex a pat on the shoulder and, after a brief examination, told him to sit up. His office, at the end of the hallway on the top floor, next to the school library, was a shabby little room with a desk, an examination table, and a medicine cabinet. Everything was white; everything was cold and unwelcoming, just like the doctor's sarcastic, superior tone of voice.

‘Captain, I want to remind you that we're this close to the playoffs.'

‘I'm aware of that,' Alex replied, eyeing the doctor with confidence.

‘Is the championship stressing you out?' the man insisted. ‘Or is it your homework?'

‘Nothing's stressing me out,' he said brusquely, but he knew it wasn't true. ‘Can I go now?'

Waiting outside the sick bay was Teo, the basketball coach. He was standing in the hallway with his back to the wall. In his hands was a biography of Michael Jordan, who he always praised as a paragon of athleticism.

Alex ignored him and headed down the hallway, but the man trailed after him.

‘Alex, stop.'

‘What's the matter? Everything's fine.'

‘Everything's not fine. If this is what we've come to, then I can't let you play in the finals.'

Alex looked him in the eye, and for a moment he focused on the word ‘we've'. This was one of the coach's habits. He only ever thought in terms of the team. If a boy had a problem, it was a problem that affected everyone.

‘Whatever you think is best.'

‘You're the team captain, your teammates need you. But if you collapse at a key moment in the game and you endanger your own health … then we have a problem.'

‘Then get yourself a new captain. I don't know what to do about it. The doctors say there's nothing wrong with me.'

‘That's not what your parents say, though.'

Alex stopped and stared at the coach, who held his gaze with a determined look.

‘My parents worry too much.'

‘If you ask me, Alex, you're hiding something. Damn it, Alex, you're the best player on the team, but I can't run the risk that … that what happened today might happen again, maybe during the finals.'

‘Then cut me from the team. That way we won't make it to the finals either.'

Alex practically ran down the stairs and emerged into the open air. As he walked down Via Porpora, turning up his jacket collar to ward off the biting chill of the Milan air, his thoughts bounced around his head relentlessly. He kept on brooding until he was outside the door to his apartment building. He couldn't let them kick him off the team just when they were going into the finals. He led the league in scoring, he was the team captain, he'd given his all in every game of the season. But if the coach decided to cut him from the team, there wasn't a lot he could say about it.

Alex went up to the second floor. A woman who lived in the apartment next door said hello. He gave her a tight, formal smile and a nod of the head.

‘I just can't take it anymore …' he muttered under his breath as he twisted the key in the lock of the heavy security door.

The apartment greeted him with silence, as it always did. At that time of day, his parents were still at work. On the table by the front door, his mother had left a note for him, as usual. It said:
There's a quiche by the microwave. Do your homework! Kisses, Mamma.
Alex walked past it without a glance.

The minute he walked into his bedroom, he dropped his backpack next to his desk, took off his jacket, and sat down on the edge of his bed. Luckily, he thought, he hadn't hit his head. Lately, he'd been able to sense when an attack was coming on and get to his knees, making the inevitable fall to the ground less dangerous. It was a minor development, nothing important, and he hadn't given it much notice. At best, it could keep him from splitting his head wide open one of these days.

He lay back on the bed and put his hands behind his head, his eyes half closed.

The first few times, only a tangled, annoying roar filled his head. Over time he'd learned to recognise a few sounds. The nicest sound he could hear was of waves crashing on the rocks. Other noises sounded like pealing bells, a hateful, continuous din.

That was during the first year of fainting spells, when Alex was twelve. Later on, things had started to change: during the attacks, images had formed in his mind. They were blurry and confused, overlapping and blending with one another, and at first it seemed impossible to link them to anything real. Nothing that had anything to do with his life, or with any memories from the distant past.

In one of the most vivid and most common visions, Alex found himself stretched out on a bed. He was surrounded by white walls, and there was hardly any furniture in the room. The only things he managed to see were a crucifix hanging on the wall in front of him, a vase of flowers on a nightstand to his right, and a window with a wooden blind pulled all the way down. He tried to move his hands, but they seemed to be stuck. Maybe his wrists were tied. That was unquestionably his worst nightmare. At a certain point, everything turned dark, and a succession of groaning laments began to swell and overlap. Indistinct voices, echoes of endless torments.

Another image that surfaced repeatedly during the first few years was that of a hand. It was fairly small and plump. Alex seized it. He tried to pull it towards him, unsuccessfully. So he did what he could: he brushed it with his fingers. He couldn't see past the hand; couldn't make out a face, a clear outline. As soon as he tried, the little hand faded away, dissolving, crumbling, slipping like sand between his fingers.

Among the many images that flowed through his head during those four years of attacks, he clearly remembered a beach. Sometimes, in the distance, he could glimpse a little girl, always the same little girl.

Over the last year, new details had emerged. The image remained misty, the face blurred, but the eyes stood out and fixed themselves in his memory. They were dark and so intense that they burrowed into his mind. They came back every night. He couldn't remember how many times he had encountered them and remembered them when he woke up in the morning, but it must have happened every night for at least a month.

Then he started hearing the voices.

The fainting was preceded by a shiver that ran down his back and by a numbness in all his limbs. But one day, Alex had sensed a voice trying to make its way through the myriad noises and cries that he'd grown used to by now.

The first few times it had been almost impossible to make out the words. It was a girl's voice, but he couldn't make out what she was saying. Then Alex had started jotting down in a notebook the words that he thought he'd understood. The first word had been ‘help'. He'd tried to answer her, but despite his best efforts to speak, he'd been unsuccessful. According to his parents, Alex would sometimes mumble while he was unconscious. Questions like ‘Who are you?' or ‘Where are you?'

He had decided to tell no one, not even his mother and father, about what he was seeing or hearing during his attacks. He couldn't say exactly why, but he sensed that what he experienced was something he needed to protect, to guard. It was his only secret.

The most significant episode had occurred three months earlier.

Alex had just come home from basketball practice. He expected his parents to be back from work at any minute. He fainted in his bedroom and, in the few seconds of shivering that were a sign of the impending attack, Alex had managed to lie down on the bed just in the nick of time. The usual fog of pictures and sounds swirled across the screen of his mind, triggering a kaleidoscope of emotions and sensations.

After the initial confusion, Alex had glimpsed the girl's face in the distance. As always, the eyes were the only distinguishable detail that emerged from the vision.

But the voice came through much more clearly this time.

Do you really exist?

For a moment he had hesitated, wondering if he'd really heard that question, so clear and so precise. Nothing like this had ever happened, and he was deeply moved and deeply frightened at the same time.

Yes.

What's your name?

Those few words reverberated in his mind and transported him into a strange head-space, filling him at once with a sense of pleasure and fulfilment.

Alex. What's yours?

A chorus of blood-curdling screams echoed in the distance.

Jenny.

Then the girl was gone, sucked away in a spiral of blurred images. In Alex's diary, that date was underlined and highlighted. It was 27 July 2014. He had
felt
the presence of the other person. He had perceived something that was terribly
real
. This was no dream, he was sure of it. It wasn't a hallucination or a vision.

Alex had
communicated
with a girl who was out there somewhere, in some distant corner of the world. He had no idea how it was even possible, but he was convinced of this: Jenny was real.

And in all likelihood, she was wrestling with the same thoughts as he was.

4

I told him
, thought Jenny as she sat at the dinner table, doing her best to conceal her excitement. Her father shot her an enquiring glance, trying to tell if his daughter was all right after yet another of her countless fainting spells. On the wall next to the refrigerator, the cuckoo clock — which the Graver family had bought last Christmas from a vendor whose stand was just outside the entrance to Altona Coastal Park — said it was 8.40 p.m.

‘It seems to me you're all better, Jenny,' said her mother as she brought the roast to the dinner table.

‘Why don't you let her say for herself whether she's all better or not,' Roger broke in. Clara only sighed, sitting down as if nothing had happened.

But Jenny wasn't interested in what her parents had to say that evening. She couldn't think about anything other than Alex.

It finally worked:
I told him where I live
.

She'd been trying to do it for what seemed like ages. Over the last year, she'd tried to communicate something about herself besides her name to him, but she thought it might be too hard. What's more, she'd never really been willing to admit that the voice in her head might belong to another human being. And there was one other thing that had kept her from trying to communicate with him: the pain. Maybe the boy who had reached out to her with the name Alex didn't feel the sheer physical pain that she did during the attacks, but for her it was torture. Each individual word perforated her brain, like a stab through her head from one temple to the other. This time, though, she was sure that she'd clearly enunciated the name of her city.

Jenny had only a very vague idea of the person she was contacting. His name was the only clue she had. His voice seemed to belong to a young person, probably someone her age, and during her visions she'd managed to glimpse his eyes, and make out the blond shock of hair hanging over his forehead.

There were times when she wondered if she wasn't building a gigantic house of cards that was sure to collapse sooner or later, destroying all her illusions. Because that was what she feared the most: losing the sensation that had followed her through every moment for years now, the hope that the voice she heard might belong to another flesh-and-blood human being.

That night, she went to bed with a clear mind. She smiled as she looked up dreamily at the ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark stars that her father had put up so many years ago were still there, shining down for her as she dropped off to sleep. Cassiopeia, the square shape of Pegasus, Andromeda, and then there were Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, separated by the twisting body of Draco. A firmament all for her.

Jenny closed her eyes.

Alex was out there; she felt sure of it. He was somewhere on the planet. And they were somehow able to communicate. She couldn't live without him any longer.

That afternoon, after gobbling down some quiche and a bottle of pear juice and killing an hour or so watching television, Alex decided to go to the library. There was a new building site across the street from his apartment block, and since that morning a crew of construction workers in fluorescent orange overalls had been drilling with jackhammers. The noise made it impossible for him to think. His mid-term exam in philosophy was getting closer, and he'd studied thirty per cent, at most, of the chapters that his teacher had assigned the class.

With his backpack slung over one shoulder, he caught one bus and transferred to another, getting off in front of the university library. He'd been there before: it was a quiet place, populated with older kids who were mostly attending the Politecnico. As he walked into the reading room, he scanned the tables for an empty seat and headed for the first one he found.

He half-heartedly started going over his notes, and then pulled out his philosophy textbook.