Multiversum (26 page)

Marco smiled in satisfaction. ‘All children talk about magical places, all kids dream up fantasy worlds. Obviously, you did too. Your mother had often heard you talk about this place. After the therapy, she wrote,
He'll never go there again, he'll always stay here with me.
That makes no sense. What parent would ever think that if their son talks about, oh, I don't know, an enchanted castle, they might actually go there? That's clearly the product of a child's imagination. It couldn't be anything else. Unless …'

‘Unless this place really exists. Was Memoria my magic place? Is that what you're trying to say?'

Marco didn't answer immediately. He was pursuing a train of thought that might be developing from a simple hypothesis into a virtual certainty.

‘Your parents pretended that what they were doing was for your own good, and acted like ordinary people trying to care for their child. I don't know why they did it, but they did. They approached a specialist who took on your case and cured you. Completely normal. Entirely above suspicion. But your parents know perfectly well what the magic place is — you were talking about it ten years ago. Now you need to find out what else you were saying about this place. You'll have to ask them, since your memories have been completely erased.'

Alex thought it over for a few seconds. Marco's explanation might be correct. He needed to try. ‘Okay.'

‘Whatever you find out, you have to follow your instincts and go to her.'

‘But what are you going to do?'

‘Alex, it's all happened already. I'll follow my own path, too.'

Alex extended his right hand towards his friend. Their eyes met for one last time, full of energy and determination, and they shook hands with a firm grip. This was no longer a sad farewell, a parting with tears and despair. It was a challenge, levelled at the world.

When Alex stepped through the ajar front door and into the apartment building where he'd grown up, at number 22, Viale Lombardia, one detail struck him: the complete absence of noise.

Until just a short while before, there had been panic in the streets, outbursts of violence, brawls, and protests. Car crashes, traffic jams, fistfights, hordes of protesters marching down the avenues, unaware that no television camera would ever capture them, that no newspaper would ever report on the event.

But as soon as Alex let the heavy wooden door swing shut behind him, he felt as if he'd stepped into an underground fallout shelter. Total silence. On the ground floor he couldn't even hear the usual commotion from the apartment on the right, just after the first three steps and before the staircase. It was where a twenty-five-year-old metalhead spent his days with his stereo on full blast, listening to Testament, Slayer, Megadeth, and other such bands. Sometimes he even left the music going when he went out.

Nor could he catch even the slightest hint of the deafening volume at which the lady on the second floor customarily watched TV. It wasn't enough for her to wear a hearing aid, she had to press the ‘+' button on her remote control to increase the volume until the number 99 appeared on the screen. The rest of the building therefore had to listen to every program she watched, at all hours of the day and night.

A howl split the surreal silence that enveloped the lobby. It was the desperate cry of a dog that had probably been left home alone.

Alex climbed the steps as an irritating draught caused a wintry breeze to make its way between the folds of his sweatshirt. Air could get in, but voices couldn't. As if the world outside that apartment building had already been extinguished.

When he reached the burglar-proof front door of his family's apartment, Alex realised that he no longer had his keys in his backpack. He must have left them at home during his last argument with his parents. So he rang the doorbell.

No answer.

He held down the buzzer insistently, but realised there was no sound from inside the apartment when he did.

He started pounding on the door with the flat of his hand, right under the peephole. ‘Open up, damn it! It's me!'

No one answered. Alex put his ear to the door to see if he could hear anything at all from inside. He heard banging. One blow after another, far enough away for him to guess that the sounds might be coming from the living room.

‘Papà? Mamma? Open the door!'

Alex stepped back and looked down, lost in thought. Then he put his ear to the door again and noticed that the noise that sounded like hammering had stopped. He tried pounding violently on the door again, screaming at the top of his lungs as he did.

The key turned in the lock, and the door swung open.

‘Oh my God … you're back. Come in, hurry,' said his mother under her breath as she opened the door just a crack before letting him in. Alex slipped inside, glaring. Valeria hastily slammed the door shut behind him, turned the key, and dead-bolted the door. She turned each lock four times, the maximum number possible, something that Alex had only seen her do when they left for their summer holidays.

‘What the hell are you doing?' he asked.

‘This was your father's decision,' Valeria replied in a monotone. Alex was already hurrying down the hall to the living room. With a hammer in his hand, Giorgio didn't so much as bother to speak to his son, who stood there watching him, wide-eyed, as he went on with his hammering. The windows were boarded shut: Alex's father was hammering in the final board.

His parents were barricading themselves inside their apartment.

‘Why?' he asked his mother, as she blew on her cupped hands and then held them up to warm her nose and cheeks.

‘He's afraid that a war's going to break out, or something like that,' Valeria replied. Then she glanced at the dial that controlled the apartment's heating system. ‘The heating's shot. Hasn't worked since yesterday, would be my guess, since the walls and floors are already cold. We only realised it late last night, but I went down to the cellar and pulled out all of Grandma's blankets and quilts. We have a pantry full of supplies. We can hold out for —'

‘I'm not staying in this bunker. I didn't come back to hide from the world. I just need the answer to one question.'

At that very moment, the power went out. The apartment, with all the roller blinds shut tight and boards nailed over every window, was plunged into darkness. Valeria, Giorgio, and Alex found themselves immersed in a glacial silence. No one dared to breathe for a few seconds. It was Valeria who reacted first, as if she had been prepared for such an eventuality, that after the heating and the phone line, the next thing to go would be the lights and the electricity. ‘I'll go get the candles.'

Alex walked down the hallway, began looking around for his backpack, and wound up tripping over it. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder, while Valeria started trying to strike some matches off the side of the matchbox. When she re-emerged into the hallway, carrying a candelabra with eight flickering flames, holding it up to light the darkness, Alex saw that her eyes looked tired and tense. He wondered why on earth she and his father could have committed such a violent act against him when he was only a child. Perhaps someone had driven them to do it.

Giorgio came over and a beam of light hit Alex full in the face. His father must have found a torch in some drawer in the study. He lowered the light. ‘You're not going anywhere,' he said in an authoritative tone, while the cold turned his breath into a little white cloud that vanished into the air. That was when Alex looked him in the eye, and he didn't need any artificial light to see deep inside his father.

‘What is the magic place?' he asked, before feeling a shiver at the back of his neck run down the length of his spinal cord. It was like stepping into a tunnel with no exit. He entered his father's memories as if propelled by a magnetic force that he lacked the strength to resist. As if a hand had reached out of Giorgio's memories, grabbed Alex, and hauled him in. The same thing that had happened to him at the Cadorna train station, when he'd involuntarily glimpsed the a stranger's past, seeing him in an encounter with a prostitute. Or what had happened with Marco, when Alex had been catapulted into the terrible memory of the accident in the mountains.

Valeria stood by helplessly, stunned by the invisible aura of energy that surrounded her son as he opened every drawer in his father's cabinet of memories, searching for information. Giorgio froze, letting the torch fall to the floor. None of them moved in the faint candlelight that illuminated the hallway.

Alex, meanwhile, had been transported into his old room. He was a child, playing with magic markers and sheets of paper. His mother was calling him for dinner, but he replied that he was busy drawing the future and that he wasn't hungry. His father came in from the corridor, picked up his son by the arms, and, after a good-natured smack on the bottom, dragged him off to the kitchen.

‘I don't want to hear another word about the future. You'll never live to see the future if you don't eat! When Mamma says dinner is ready, you go straight to the dinner table!'

Alex blinked involuntarily for a few seconds. He could no longer feel a single muscle in his body, yet he remained on his feet, standing straight, looking at Giorgio.

Now there was a garden, a few dogs chasing one another, and children playing on a swing. He was on a merry-go-round, apparently happy.

Not a sign of depression. He looked like a child no different from any other. It was a beautiful day, and Valeria was sitting on a bench, reading a fashion magazine. Every so often she would call out to Alex, warning him not to wander off. ‘Stay where I can see you, you little hooligan! And be careful not to hurt yourself.'

Every so often, he would come back to the bench where his mother was sitting, poke up his little face from behind the magazine, and smile at her. Now Giorgio was sitting next to her, too.

‘I was in the magic place and Jenny was there too. I wish I could play with her here, that way you could meet her too, but she says she can't come. Only the two of us are allowed to see each other.'

The expression on Valeria's face suddenly turned cross.

‘You don't like it when I talk about the magic place. Why not, Mamma?'

Valeria didn't answer. But her eyes were filled with pain as she looked down at him while he continued his impassioned account.

‘Jenny says that the magic place is only when we're together and that means it's only for us, it's our own special world.'

‘That's enough now, Alex.'

‘When we're together, we're like the sun.'

Alex closed his eyes and then opened them wide.

He looked away, releasing the weight of memories and images from the past.

‘I got the answer I needed,' he said with determination.

He turned to the heavy security door, while his parents exchanged a glance of astonishment that couldn't seem to evolve into rage or determination. As if something halted their every instinct. Something that they'd never be able to describe.

‘I'm begging you, Alex …' said Valeria, with a crack in her voice and tears in her eyes, on the verge of collapse as she reached out to her son.

Giorgio went on shaking his head, helplessly, staring into space.

Alex looked behind him one last time, turning only his head while keeping his back to his parents and unlocking the door. ‘Goodbye.'

In an instant, he found himself outside what had for years been his crystal prison, as he prepared to abandon forever the people who had loved him most and hindered him most, for reasons that he still couldn't grasp. In any case, there was no time to blame anyone, or to reconstruct that fragment of his history.

The end was nigh.

And now Alex knew what Memoria was.

Anywhere the two of us are, Jenny. Together. I'm coming.

32

As soon as he was back on the street, Alex realised that the surreal silence inside the apartment building was closely bound up with what was happening outside.

No more fights in front of the banks. No more shouting.

The panic, in its most demented and hysterical form, had subsided.

Now there was terror.

Alex headed for Piazza Piola. As he walked, he became aware of what the people around him were doing — every last one of them.

They were staring at the sky.

Alex looked up, too, as people's faces began to show an awareness of their imminent doom. Everyone was out on the street, ashen-faced, wide-eyed, mouths twisted into grimaces of amazement as they observed the contorted mass that was looming overhead.

The asteroid was still far away, but it looked threatening. It resembled a large grey stone that had suddenly appeared in the firmament, a spot rending the fabric of the sky. The colours that served as the background for its arrival were the most enchanting hues of sunset, with scintillating glimpses tearing through a canvas of red and purple, while the swirling clouds around it formed grey and light-blue skeins.

But no cloud dared to venture between their eyes and the new Lord of Fate. None dared to obscure the most extraordinary and chilling vision that had greeted the world since the dawn of time. The masses of cloud thinned out and gathered back together, extending and contracting.