Amanda turns off the lantern.
I crumple down against the cold wall, and she pulls me over into her lap.
Runs her fingers through my hair.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 40
I come to consciousness in the pitch-black, lying on my side on the floor of the box, my back to the wall. Amanda is pressed up close against me, our bodies contoured together, her head resting in the crook of my arm.
I’m hungry and thirsty.
I wonder how long I’ve slept.
At least my ear has stopped bleeding.
It’s impossible to deny the reality of our helplessness.
Aside from each other, this box is the only constant we have.
A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean.
It’s our shelter.
Our prison.
Our home.
—
Carefully, I untangle us.
Pulling off my hoodie, I fold it into a pillow and slide it under Amanda’s head.
She stirs but doesn’t wake.
I feel my way around to the door, knowing I shouldn’t take the risk of breaking the seal. But I have to know what’s out there, and the claustrophobia of the box is wearing on me.
Turning the handle, I drag it slowly open.
First sensation: the smell of evergreens.
Shafts of sunlight slant down through a forest of closely spaced pine trees.
In the near distance, a deer stands motionless, staring through its dark, wet eyes at the box.
When I step outside, the deer bounds off soundlessly through the pines.
The forest is startlingly quiet.
Mist hovers over the pine-needle floor.
I walk out a little ways from the box and sit on a piece of ground in direct morning sun that feels warm and bright against my face.
A breeze pushes through the tops of the trees.
I catch a hint of woodsmoke in the wind.
From an open fire?
A chimney?
I wonder, Who lives here?
What sort of a world is this?
I hear footsteps.
Glancing back, I see Amanda coming toward me through the trees and register a pang of guilt—I almost got her killed in that last world. She isn’t just here because of me. She’s here because she saved me. Because she did a brave, risky thing.
She sits beside me and turns her face to the sun.
“How’d you sleep?” she asks.
“Hard. Awful crick in my neck. You?”
“Sore all over.”
She leans in close and studies my ear.
“Bad?” I ask.
“No, the bullet just trimmed off part of your earlobe. I’ll clean it up for you.”
She hands me a liter of water we refilled in that futuristic Chicago, and I take a long sip that I wish would never end.
“You doing okay?” she asks.
“I can’t stop thinking about her. Lying dead on our porch. And Charlie up in his room. We are so lost.”
Amanda says, “I know it’s hard, but the question you should be thinking about—we should both be thinking about—is why did you bring us to that world?”
“All I wrote was, ‘I want to go home.’ ”
“Exactly. That’s what you wrote, but you carried baggage through the door.”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obviously not.”
“Your worst fear.”
“That type of scenario isn’t everyone’s?”
“Maybe. But it’s so perfectly yours I’m surprised you don’t see it.”
“How is it perfectly mine?”
“Not just losing your family, but losing them to illness. The same way you lost your mother when you were eight years old.”
I look over at Amanda.
“How’d you know that?”
“How do you think?”
Of course. She was Jason2’s therapist.
She says, “Watching his mother die was the defining event of his life. It played a critical part in why he never married, never had kids. Why he sunk himself into work.”
I believe it. There were moments, early on, when I considered running from Daniela. Not because I wasn’t crazy about her, but because on some level, I was afraid of losing her. And I felt the same fear all over again when I found out she was pregnant with Charlie.
“Why would I seek out a world like that?”
“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn’t make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. I happen to think that world taught us a lot about how the box works.”
Passing the water back to her, I say, “Forty.”
“Forty what?”
“Forty ampoules left. Half are yours. That gives us each twenty chances to get this right. What do you want to do?”
“I’m not sure. All I know at this point is that I’m not going back to my world.”
“So do you want to stay together, or is this goodbye?”
“I don’t know how you feel, but I think we still need each other. I think maybe I can help you get home.”
—
I lean back against the trunk of a pine tree, a notebook resting on my knees, my thoughts teeming.
What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.
It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself.
My emotions.
My inner storm.
The secret engines that drive me.
If there are infinite worlds, how do I find the one that is uniquely, specifically mine?
I stare at the page and begin to write down every detail of my Chicago that comes to mind. I paint my life with words.
The sounds of the children in my neighborhood walking to school together, their voices like a stream flowing over rocks—high and burbling.
Graffiti on the faded white brick of a building three blocks from my house that was so artfully done it was never painted over.
I meditate on the intricacies of my home.
The fourth step on the staircase that always creaks.
The downstairs bathroom with the leaky faucet.
The way my kitchen smells as coffee brews first thing in the morning.
All the tiny, seemingly insignificant details upon which my world hangs.
AMPOULES REMAINING: 32
There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being—a mannequin or humanlike robot—it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.
It’s a similar psychological effect as I walk the streets of this Chicago that’s almost mine. I would take an apocalyptic nightmare any day. Crumbled buildings and gray wasteland don’t hold a candle to standing on a corner I’ve passed a thousand times and realizing that the street names are wrong. Or the coffee place where I always stop to grab my morning triple-shot Americano with soy is a boutique wine shop instead. Or my house at 44 Eleanor Street is a brownstone inhabited by strangers.
—
This is the fourth Chicago we’ve connected to since escaping that world of sickness and death. Each has been like this one—almost home.