Multiversum (25 page)

Once he'd managed to drive that memory away, Alex looked at his parents in horror. They sat helpless in the presence of that gaze.

‘Goodbye,' he said, and then turned, picked up the cardboard box, and left the apartment. Only Marco could help him figure this out now.

30

‘I'm speechless,' Marco said after hearing his friend's revelations. ‘You've always had this gift! Now I see why you made that videotape when you were a kid …'

‘We need to study the drawings. See if we can find some more information.'

‘Sure. Let me take a look.' Marco pulled a few sheets and notepads out of the box. Meanwhile, Alex was holding the painting of Mary Thompson in his hands: her curly hair was thick and dark, and the strokes of the magic markers wandered outside the outlines of that stout, plump body. Next to the woman was a sofa and a painting with the moon's surface in the foreground. The same painting that he had seen at the home of Jenny's nanny.

‘What I can't understand is why me. What am I? What are we, Jenny and I?'

‘Alex, maybe it's not you. Maybe it's not the two of you.'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I mean, you might not be the only two. Maybe there are others out there. In fact, it's reasonable to think that you're not alone. Becker is one of you.'

Alex looked at his friend anxiously as a growing cacophony of noise arose from the street: car horns, shouts, sirens, like a wave that was sweeping over the city.

‘Let me keep going through your things,' Marco said, pulling another stack of papers out of the box.

Alex took out a diary with a purple leather cover. He opened it and immediately recognised his mother's handwriting. This was her journal. He started to leaf through the pages. Aside from a few notes about his birth, such as his weight, size, and some important moments from the first few months of his life, the journal focused mainly on his illness.

He looked up towards the window. The city was tinged in grey: a dense fog had fallen like a thick blanket over the streets. Alex glimpsed a woman's silhouette in the apartment building across the road. She was leaning forward, collecting some dry laundry. An ordinary, everyday act that made Alex think of how his life had been turned upside down and inside out in the past week — and how everyone's lives would soon be changed forever.

‘This seems interesting,' Marco commented, as he looked at more papers. ‘
I dreamed that Jenny's going to go away
,' he started reading from the sheet in his hands, ‘
that she's going to abandon me. But it's not her fault. One day we'll meet again.'

Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing.
All of that's already happened
, he thought to himself. ‘Marco, who the hell was I when I was a kid?'

‘You were a special person,' his friend replied as he went on rummaging in the box. Then all of a sudden he stopped, as if he'd had a flash of inspiration.

‘Perhaps the infinite dimensions are simultaneous,' he said, half shutting his eyes as if to capture a fleeting thought. ‘Like a CD.'

‘What does a CD have to do with any of it?'

‘There are various theories on the subject. When I first started thinking about the Multiverse, I stumbled across one of these theories. A CD has a beginning and an end, and if you play it, it has a certain duration. But if you pull it out of the player, then, at a given moment, you hold the disc's entire span of time. It's possible that universes, too, are simult —' Marco suddenly stopped, his eyes widening.

‘Now what?'

‘Look,' said his friend as he held out a sheet of paper to Alex. It showed two guys, crudely drawn, in a room. One of them was sitting in an armchair, and written underneath was the name
Alex
. The other guy was sitting in a chair with a large wheel in the foreground, and the name
Marco
written next to him. The figure in the armchair was holding a sheet of paper that had a tiny reproduction of the same drawing. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page was a date:
December 2014
.

Alex was petrified. He didn't know what to do. His mind was paralysed by the idea that whatever he might say at that instant, in all likelihood he'd already said it once before.

‘Do you realise what this is?' Marco asked, as the noise from the street was replaced by the sound of the downpour that had begun all over the city.

‘This is us. It's us … now! I drew this picture ten years ago!'

Alex remained dumbstruck for a few seconds, his eyes staring at the prophetic drawing. Then he started shaking his head, his eyes downcast. Marco started leafing frantically through the other drawings. Somewhere in those papers, he might find their destiny written, and perhaps not theirs alone. A few moments later he froze when he saw a wrinkled sheet of paper.

‘No … it can't be.'

‘What have you found?' asked Alex. Marco said nothing, and simply held out the drawing so he could see it for himself.

When Alex had the drawing before his eyes, he went pale.

On the right side of the sheet, there was a circle with a number of brown shapes surrounded by larger blue areas. The strokes, made by a crayon with a broad tip, often strayed outside the thick outlines. It looked like a planet, and it could easily be a sketch of the Earth.

Alex shifted his gaze to the left side of the sheet.

Another round disc, bright red in colour, with a trail ahead of it as if to indicate the direction it was travelling in: straight at the large blue sphere.

Below that, on the bottom right, a date.

‘Tomorrow,' said Marco. ‘Here on Earth. What happened before is about to happen again.'

‘No, it isn't true, I can't believe it. It must be some kind of mistake.'

‘Alex, this is no mistake!' Marco picked up the various drawings, and showed them one after another to his friend. ‘You drew the parallel realities you travelled to over the past few days. And you drew the pier, you drew Mary Thompson …'

‘Are we about to die?' Alex asked in a faint voice.

Marco looked him in the eye with an expression that had suddenly become melancholy. ‘Yes, I'm afraid we are.'

In an instant, Alex was swept away by an image before his eyes. He saw it as if it were there, just a few metres away, right there in the room, next to Marco. It was the Malaysian fortune teller, sitting behind his stand, with the cards in his hands.

The man's words pounded on the walls of his skull like a chorus of bells, tolling at full volume, while his penetrating gaze hypnotised Alex.

All of us in great danger … You important.

‘It can't be,' Alex whispered as he looked at the drawing that had fallen to the floor. ‘How can it be that no one has said anything? Did you know anything about it?'

‘A small meteorite can be seen as many as several days before impact. But that wouldn't cause the end of the world, like Becker has predicted. Clearly, in this case we're talking about a major asteroid.'

‘Then what? Then it must be a mistake, and this drawing isn't —'

‘Alex, a major asteroid might well have been sighted ahead of impact. But … it could also have been kept secret.'

‘What does that mean? That we're all going to die and nobody thought to tell us about it?'

‘If they've prepared a city-sized bunker, or something like that, they obviously can't afford to throw the whole planet into a state of panic.'

‘But the whole planet's in a state of panic now, and then some! Even without anyone knowing a thing about an impending cosmic impact …'

‘Of course. Because they've realised that in the third millennium it's no easy feat to keep a piece of news this important under cover. So in the days leading up to the catastrophe, they made sure they eliminated all channels of communication.'

‘But who are
they
? Who are you talking about?'

‘I don't know who they are, Alex! All I know is that the internet doesn't just vanish from one day to the next by chance. Something's happening. There are some who may survive, and there are others who might be kidding themselves that they can. And you … you and Jenny, perhaps, have a chance.'

As he uttered those words, Marco thought back to what the professor had told him.
They can save themselves, but death will take them all the same.

Alex stared blankly. Everything he had seen and experienced up till that day was about to be destroyed. Marco slammed his fist down on the table and went on: ‘Becker isn't crazy. It all adds up. And if you can save yourselves by reaching Memoria, then do it and don't think twice. You have to find it.'

‘I wouldn't even know where to begin.'

‘Then go back to Jenny. The one thing I know for sure is that you have to find it together. I can't say whether anyone else can be saved. But I do know this: I'm a goner.'

Alex kept staring into space. Finally, he could no longer hold back his tears. He stood up, leaned forward, and hugged his friend tight. ‘No.'

‘Alex, I'm done for. I can't travel into another dimension. I can't see the future. I'm just an ordinary person and I'm going to die, like everyone else.'

Alex said nothing. He knew his friend was right. And he was pretty sure he'd be facing the same fate. But now he still had one chance: go back to Jenny and find Memoria, whatever that might be.

‘I love you, man. But Marco, you could still —'

Marco shook his head to stop Alex saying anything more. ‘You have to do it. This is your path. You can go to her. You can cross dimensions. Perhaps in her reality nothing bad is about to happen at all. Maybe that's the point of your gift: you can escape from here. I'm doomed no matter what. Go on, Alex. There's no time to waste.'

‘I can't handle this, honestly. I just can't do it.'

‘Get the hell out of here! Don't piss me off now. I don't want your sympathy!'

Alex stared at Marco, his eyes puffy and glistening.

‘Goodbye, my friend. Whatever happens tomorrow, you'll never leave this place.' Alex placed a hand lightly on his chest. Then he turned and walked to the front door in silence.

Marco watched him walk away. All the years of their friendship reeled before his eyes, hitting him like a cyclone. He saw them laughing together as they played video games. He saw the nights they spent reading horror stories, surrounded only by flickering candlelight. He saw the hugs and tears at his grandmother's funeral, when Alex was by his side, the only one of his friends who had been there. As always. Someone who'd been more than a brother to him was leaving his apartment, his home, never to return.

‘Wait!' shouted Marco as Alex shut the door behind him. In that single word there was a fresh burst of enthusiasm.

Alex was caught off guard. He spun around and hurried back into the living room. ‘Did you think of something ?'

Marco looked at him with a determined gleam in his eye. ‘I might've just figured out what Memoria is.'

31

‘You figured it out just like that?' Alex was on his feet, facing his friend.

Marco stared at him intensely. ‘There's someone who knows perfectly well that you're special. And they've always known it.'

‘Are you talking about my parents? They just thought I was depressed, if you want to know the truth.'

‘How could that be? How could a mother allow a doctor to subject her six-year-old son to shock therapy?'

Alex looked around awkwardly without answering.

‘Your parents scorched your brain under the guise of a therapy that's technically sound and effective, justifying such a drastic intervention with the excuse that you were depressed. Does that strike you as normal?'

Alex lowered his eyes, offended, and considered what his friend had said. ‘What are you getting at?'

‘While you were leaving and I was thinking about our past, this page from your mother's journal caught my eye. I'd looked at it before, but this time I noticed a detail that could explain everything.'

‘What detail?'

‘Right here, Valeria talks about a place you often mentioned. A “magic place”, that's what you called it. This part of the diary dates from the time immediately after the treatment, and Valeria writes that you, and I'm reading verbatim here,
stopped having nightmares, stopped talking about Jenny, stopped making apocalyptic predictions, and stopped drawing strange symbols or scenes of the end of the world.
But that's not all … There's one particular phrase that struck me, that sent me a signal. It's the key to everything. Read it for yourself,' said Marco, handing the journal to his friend.

‘
My little boy has stopped talking about that magic place. He'll never see it again, he'll never go there again, he'll always stay here with me
,' Alex read out the words.