Multiversum (31 page)

Becker looked at the sky and they followed his gaze: the asteroid was red, incandescent, and hurtling rapidly closer. It left behind it a trail of rubble like what a comet would spew out, and it seemed to rotate as it tumbled towards the Earth.

‘What the hell …?' Alex grabbed Jenny's wrist.

‘This is nothing but a message. It's the only way I have of speaking to you. Once I vanish from your minds, we'll never see each other again.'

‘We have no idea how to save ourselves! What is Memoria?' shouted Jenny.

‘It wouldn't make any difference if I told you.'

Alex and Jenny exchanged a glance filled with terror and bewilderment, then they realised that they were back in the familiar walls of the dining room. The grandfather's rifles were crisscrossed above the fireplace, and now made them feel safe.

‘Why did my parents subject me to shock therapy?' insisted Alex. ‘And why did Jenny's nanny back in my dimension kill her?'

‘Because in people like us,' replied Becker, scribbling something intently on his notepad, ‘there is a light that glows. Those who did you harm weren't aware of it. They harmed you without thinking. There is an energy in the universe … the same energy that gives life and destroys it. Often it manifests itself simply in our surroundings, flowing around us, invisible and undefinable, orbiting our lives; while at other times it takes possession of them.'

‘I don't understand a thing!' Alex blurted out.

‘It wasn't your parents who had you subjected to shock therapy. It wasn't Mary Thompson who killed Jenny, and you, Alex, weren't murdered by a bloodthirsty mob.'

He thought back to the moment when he was killed, stabbed through the chest with a knife.

‘Each of us live a potentially infinite number of lives. Few people are aware of it. You are among those few. But the soul that ties together each of our many individual lives … is one and one alone. Co-existing inside me are all the Thomas Beckers that I have decided not to be. There's the one that married Kirsten. There's the one that took my father's advice and decided to become a lawyer …'

Jenny shook her head slightly, in confusion. Alex went on staring at the old man.

‘… and there's the one who died as a boy, after he left the classroom when he heard the first shot and then tried to separate the two students. But there are many, many more, more than I can possibly imagine. Or that I simply can't remember.'

Jenny raised her eyebrows and sat there, speechless, while Alex was reminded of the reasoning that had led him to believe that a part of the soul of little Jenny, murdered by Mary Thompson, still resided somewhere inside him.

‘The asteroid is going to destroy everything, isn't it?' asked Alex. ‘Will every possibility of our lives be destroyed?'

The professor paused and smiled. ‘The end is part of the beginning. There is no such thing as cause and effect — it is you who are moving between causes and effects.'

Alex looked down and shook his head, and thought to himself that such an explanation might be satisfactory to a brainiac like Marco, but to him it was nothing more than the ravings of a lunatic.

‘The asteroid is going to strike,' Becker went on. ‘It's going to strike in every possible universe. And it won't be long now. Everything you know is destined to end.'

The professor looked up from the sheet of paper and looked at Alex and Jenny as if he wanted to enjoy the sudden look of curiosity on their faces.

‘Listen,' Alex replied in a determined voice. ‘If there's a way for us to save ourselves, tell us now, while there's still time.'

Becker looked him in the eye. He pinned him to his gaze as everything around them began to dissolve and disappear, as if the walls, tables, chairs, and tiles were all being sucked down into a vortex, leaving them all in an ethereal, impalpable limbo, where there was nothing but gazes and voices. Then he turned over his notebook and extended his arm to show Alex and Jenny what he had scrawled on the page. The word, traced and retraced so violently that it had almost torn through the paper, was:

Memoria

37

The box had never moved from its place.

From the day that Marco had moved into that apartment, it had never been moved. Dresser by the window in the bedroom, first drawer from the top.

He picked it up, his eyes already glistening.

He set it down in his lap and placed his hands on the wheels of his wheelchair, steering it into the other room. His beloved ‘engine room', once his private domain, was now a useless lounge room filled with lifeless devices, rendered inert by the total electrical blackout. Marco looked at his computers with a knot in his throat, a knot that made it hard to breathe. ‘Thanks. I'd never have pulled through if it hadn't been for you guys. But now Mother Nature's the winner. For that matter, Mother Nature's always the winner …' He glanced out the window. He looked up at the sky: it was like a magnificent, swirling fresco of colours. Like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter.

Marco smiled bitterly as he headed back to his bedroom.

‘Go on, admit it. You think that it's a real spot, don't you, Alex?' he'd said to his friend one night, amused and proud of his research. ‘But it's actually nothing more than a giant storm, a hurricane that's been raging for centuries on the surface of Jupiter. To us, it looks like it's standing still. But in fact it's a fully-fledged natural cataclysm! You see? Everything is relative. Our observations can be deceptive, depending on the distance.'

‘I have to say, I always thought it was just something strange on the planet's surface. Like a gigantic drawing in the dirt.'

‘Alex, Jupiter doesn't have dirt. It's a gaseous planet, not a rocky one like Earth.'

‘I give up, you win. Turn on the PlayStation, and shut up about Jupiter!'

He remembered that exchange as if the two of them had been talking about Jupiter yesterday.

How I miss you, my friend. I wonder where you are now.

Marco set the box on the bed and opened it.

The photographs of his childhood.

The holiday cards he made for his parents, cards that he designed and drew when he was a little boy, with paper windows that opened up and revealed all sorts of surprises.

Pictures of his labrador retriever, Cannone. He'd lost him the year before his parents were killed; the dog had been like a big brother to him.

There must be a dimension where my life turned out well, where I had a life with my family, my dog, my legs …

Marco lingered over a photograph of his father fishing, his arms stretched out to brace the rod, his head turned to watch his son playing with the bait worms. In the days when he could still walk.

His father's smile, the happiness in his mother's eyes as she laid out their picnic. A knot of nostalgic yearning. Marco clutched the picture to his chest.

‘I've never believed in a higher being,' he started saying in a loud voice, as if he were declaiming his announcement to an invisible audience. ‘I've always believed in science. I don't think there's going to be a tomorrow. Our time is over; that mass of rock is going to roll the closing credits. But if there could ever be a second chance, if there really was something that comes afterwards … I just wish I could hold you all in my arms again.'

The tears rolled down Marco's cheeks and onto the photograph, where they mingled with the faces of that happy day, long since buried in the abysses of memory.

Alex's closest friend sat for a few minutes with his eyes closed. He sobbed and wept until he was almost out of breath. All the research he had done, all the technological miracles he'd explored and constructed himself … it was all about to come to an end. There would never be another dawn.

Never again would he wake up wondering:
What am I going to invent today?

And never again would he be able to open that box, or weep and free himself of the suffering that had been his daily companion for far too many years now.

Marco raised his hands to his face and then ran them through his hair. He sat there for a few more seconds with the photo pressed to his heart. The only place his parents had never left.

Then, suddenly, there was a noise unlike anything he'd ever heard before. It started with a rumbling thunder, followed by the sound you might hear in an earthquake. But it was coming from overhead.

Marco steered his wheelchair to the window and saw.

There was panic outside. People had poured into the streets and piazzas of the city: some stood motionless, peering up into the sky; others ran with no particular destination in mind; and some stood with their eyes closed, doing their best not to see. The cacophony created by the shouting and screaming, the howling of dogs, the voices of people talking animatedly as they looked up at the sky, was terrifying. But it couldn't drown out the chilling roar that was swallowing up the planet.

It was right up there, overhead.

Enormous.

Powerful.

It was the final chapter, and it was about to be written once and for all. It looked like an incandescent ribbon slicing the sky in two, and not even Marco, with all his knowledge of astrophysics, was capable of predicting exactly where it would fall and the extent of the damage it would cause. He did know that a powerful seismic wave would spread out in all directions, for thousands and thousands of miles, from the point of impact. Like a rock tossed into the ocean, the asteroid would generate circular waves that would reach every remote corner of the planet. It would generate tsunamis in the oceans, earthquakes on dry land, climatic devastation, and a shift in the Earth's axis. Marco's hands gripped the armrests of his wheelchair as he braced himself. His heart was racing, and his eyes opened wide at the sight of the asteroid that was about to destroy everything.

The glass in front of his eyes started to tremble, while the walls began to shake and his precious textbooks started falling, one after another, from the shelves on the wall. The trees began to be tossed around like the waves in a giant ocean storm, while the roof antennas flew away, uprooted by the fury of the wind.

From the street came the echoes of screams, the overlapping sounds of people shouting and sobbing. Marco watched in silence, motionless, powerless. He wouldn't go out into the streets of Milan, he wouldn't take part in that final apocalyptic chorus, he wouldn't beg Nature to have mercy. He'd watch the end from his window.

He closed his eyes.

It's over
, he thought, as he clutched the photograph of the picnic tight to his chest.

38

Alex lurched forward, panting.

His legs were still under the blanket, his chest was bare, his hands were tingling with pins and needles.

In front of him was the chest of drawers. On his left, the chair on which he'd laid his jeans and his sweater. Everything was still shrouded in darkness, broken here and there by faint shafts of light from the gaps in the wooden blind.

‘Jenny!' he shouted as he turned in her direction. She was stretched out by his side in the bed where they'd made love, her eyes wide. She sat up slowly and stared at him without a word.

‘It wasn't a dream, was it?' he began, as their thoughts intersected.

‘I saw the same things. What are we headed for?'

‘That's the only answer he didn't give us.'

‘It was the only one we were after.'

‘Let's get moving. Let's get out of here.'

They got dressed as quickly as they could. Luckily, their clothes had dried while they slept. When they opened the door and ran downstairs, there was no one to be found. The house was silent, and it also seemed that the gunshots and screams of the night before could no longer be heard outside.

They rushed into the kitchen, but it was empty. No one in the bedrooms, no one in the bathroom.

The basement
, thought Alex as he ran down to the room where they'd first been welcomed into this family.

When he walked in, there was no one but the elderly grandmother, sitting in her armchair as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She looked at him with an enigmatic smile. Then she slowly bobbed her head, up and down. She seemed unruffled, with the expression of someone who clearly understood that their time was almost up.

Alex went back to the front hall, locked arms with Jenny, and opened the front door.

They were all outside. Everyone who lived on that street. Petrified. Staring straight up at the sky.

‘This is real,' said Alex as he looked up. The same sky that Marco could see in his original dimension. The same sky that everyone, in every corner of the infinite Multiverse, was staring at in that exact moment. A tangle of clouds dragged relentlessly by the wind; ribbons of vapours intertwining in the sky and blending with the vivid colours of an impossible sunset; while the asteroid was there, at the centre of the muddied fresco, with its majestic, all-powerful appearance, and a long fiery trail stretching out until it vanished into the depths of space.