The Alternate History Me

The Alternate History Me...The Day The Universe Hiccuped


It was a simple decision. I was reading an absorbing article on the current woes of the Middle East when I realized I had to pee. There was a momentary question: should I pee now or finish the article? I decided the need was greater than the intellectual curiosity, and besides, I had every intention of picking the article back up after I had finished taking care of business.
So I got up, went to the bathroom, urinated, washed my hands, and went back into the living room. I did this all on automatic; my brain was still processing the article. What I saw on the couch blew Arafat and Sharon clean out of my head.
It was me. I was still sitting on the couch reading the article. Same green sweater, same black jeans. I must have made some kind of noise because the other me looked up. I was as startled to see myself as I was. I quickly touched my own face to make sure I was really me. Then I went over to the other me. She was staring at me with huge eyes. I touched her hair. She flinched. It was my hair, all right. And I needed to go to the hairdresser, I noted, because my dark roots were showing. The other me jerked her head away.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” I demanded.
“I might ask the same of you.” So that’s what my voice sounds like! It sounded different outside of my head.
“You are me. I am you. That much, I think, is obvious. Is this some kind of joke?”
“I don’t see how it could be. But I don’t understand what happened.”
“Look, we have to straighten this out.” I sat down on the couch and put my head in my hands. “I just can’t think. I can’t. Look, I’ll be Jenny 1, and we’ll call you Jenny 2 until we can figure out something better.”
“Why do I have to be Jenny 2?” the other me asked. “I was here first.”
“Just for convenience purposes,” I soothed myself.
“All right.”
Obviously I was feeling agreeable today. In her initial shock, Jenny 2 had let the magazine flutter to the floor, and so I picked it up and placed it on the table. “What was the last thing you remember?”
“The last thing of any importance was hearing the toilet flush and seeing myself come into the living room. Everything else seems kind of trivial right now.”
“Okay, let’s try something else. What’s your first memory?”
“My brother sitting on me in our wading pool. I think I was about two. I couldn’t breathe.”
“The same exact thing happened to me!” I exclaimed, and then realized why. “It’s because you are me.”
“Wow,” Jenny 2 said and took my hand in hers. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this to happen.”
“Me too!” We smiled at each other. “You have some salad caught in my teeth. I mean your teeth.”
Jenny 2 laughed. “You too!” We both picked our teeth, unable to take our eyes off one another.
“But what happened? Why are we both here?”
“I know—“ she started.
“The book!” I said at the same time, and we ran over to the bookshelf. It was a physics book. We both reached for it at the same time, and took it down together, moving as if we were one. We sat down together on the couch. Strange, I smelled her perfume, my own perfume, more vividly on her than I ever had on myself.
“Did you understand it?”
“Not anymore than you did.” I laughed. “But I loved the ideas in it. They really—“
“Stretched my brain,” she finished. She turned away from the book and looked at me with a lover’s eyes. “I just can’t believe it. That this happened to me!”
“To us,” I corrected. I tapped the book to draw her attention back to it. I know how easily I could be distracted.
The page was open to the Myriad Universe Theory. “It says that there is a theory, that for every decision we make, the opposite decision was also made. Then the universe splits in two. Therefore, there exists a universe for every second of every life for every person that ever lived.”
“Wow.” We both stared at the book. “What was the last decision that we made?”
“I had to pee, quite badly.” Jenny 2 closed her eyes. “I shouldn’t drink so much coffee. But I wanted to finish reading the article, so I decided to wait.”
“No, I went to the bathroom. I decided that I would pee and then come back and finish.”
“That’s it, then. That’s when our universe split.”
“But why are we together then? What happened?”
“I don’t know, but we have to do something. I have a feeling that this could destabilize everything. And how are we going to explain this when David comes home?”
“David! Our fiancée! I had forgotten all about him.”
“I have an idea. Let’s go to the university and ask Professor Stanton. He was very hot on the Myriad University Theory, as you recall from our funnybook Physics class.”
“Yes, Physics for Dummies.”
“We can’t walk around like this, though. We’ll really freak people out.”
“They’ll just think we are identical twins.”
“But people who know me, or us, know I am an only child.”
“Let’s wear a disguise then. Who gets to wear it?”
We couldn’t decide who would wear the disguise, so we both wore one. I put my hair in a ponytail and Jenny 2 attacked hers with a curling iron. We both changed clothes. I wore heels and Jenny 2 wore flats. We had a brief disagreement about who would get to wear make-up, but then we compromised and both put some on. When we were done, we surveyed ourselves with pleasure. Then we looked at the pair of green sweaters and two pairs of black Levi’s lying abandoned on the bed. On impulse, I reached down and checked the tags on the clothing items. They were identical.
We had another small spat about who would get to drive the car. I finally agreed to let Jenny 2 do it so that I could study her arms. I was fascinated by her freckles, and kept comparing them to my own.
Exactly the same.
When we got to the university we raced to Professor Stanton’s office. Jenny 2 peeked in the window.
“He’s there, but he’s having a conference with another student.”
“Let’s barge in. This could mean a Nobel Prize for him!” Jenny 2 nodded and opened the door.
When we had been his students, his office had been slightly manic. He hadn’t cleaned it since then and now it was schizophrenic. Papers were stacked on every available surface in precarious-looking piles. Professor Stanton looked from Jenny 2 to me and there was no reaction. There was also nothing but annoyance from the dweeby kid sitting across from him.
“Excuse us for interrupting, Professor Stanton,” I said.
“We have a problem and we need your help. Could we speak to you alone, please?”
“Ah. I remember you.” He pointed at Jenny 2. “Or is it you?” His finger slid over to me. “One of you was my student.”
“Yes, that’s our problem,” Jenny 2 said.
“Can we talk in privacy?” I asked, nodding toward dweeb boy. “It’s very important.”
“I’m sorry, Damon,” Professor said to the nerd. “Can you come by tomorrow? We can discuss your theory on electromagnetism then.”
Damon stood up and shot both of us a withering look. We both stuck our tongues out at him and laughed.
“All right, ladies,” Stanton said as soon as Damon had completed his less than graceful exit. “Which one of you was my student?”
“Um, we both were.” I took my ponytail out and kicked off my shoes to give him the full effect.
“Twins!” he exclaimed with wonder. “Why don’t I remember you? I would certainly remember having twins in my class. Just think of all the experiments I could have run. Well, it’s never too late. Is that why you’re here?”
“We aren’t twins, Professor. We’re the same person. We are both Jenny,” Jenny 2 said.
“Just think of all the experiments you can run on us now!” I said, and Jenny 2 laughed.
“The same person?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”
So we launched into an explanation of what had happened and our theory behind it. It was chaotic, as we both talked over one another in a scramble to tell the juiciest parts.
“Is this some kind of prank you kids are pulling on me?”
“No joke, sir,” Jenny 2 said.
“I have an idea!” I said. “Why don’t you get the biology department—“
“To test our DNA! Of course!”
“Hey, that was my idea.” I pushed Jenny 2’s shoulder.
“Our idea,” she corrected.
“The Myriad Universe Theory. Full of alternate histories.” Stanton leaned back in his chair and almost lost his balance. Jenny 2 and I giggled. He picked up the telephone and dialled the biology department, asking another professor to send a student to meet him there with blood testing equipment. “I would like to believe…” he trailed off, looking back and forth at Jenny 2 and myself.
Jenny 2 smiled and patted his shoulder. “Let’s go to your laboratory, Professor. Maybe you can finally prove your theory.”
His laboratory was in a lot better shape than his office. The janitorial staff was allowed into the sacred hall of Physics, just in case a University patron stopped by for a look. There were many long high tables in rows. On the tabletops were some nifty-looking materials, physics experiments of some sort. Stanton told us to hide under one of the tables. We immediately imported some of the experiments from the top of the table to our hiding place under it and started playing with wooden slides and electric coils. I grinned at Jenny 2 and she smiled back. I would have never guessed how much fun it was to have yourself as a friend.
There was a knock on the door.
“O.K., you girls, hush now!” Stanton commanded. This set off another string of helpless giggles. He answered the door.
“Thanks for the kit,” Stanton said.
“Don’t you want me to take the blood samples?” The biology geek asked.
“Come back in ten minutes,” Stanton said.
“What are you doing in here?”
“An experiment,” he answered mysteriously, and we heard the door close. We broke out in laughter and scrambled out of our hiding place.
“I have a theory,” Stanton said. “That one of the by-products of the Myriad Universe Theory is excessively juvenile behavior.”
“Lighten up,” I said. “We’re just having fun. You don’t meet yourself everyday.”
“This is true. Fingers, please.”
Jenny 2 and I both held our middle fingers out for sacrifice.
“Have you ever done this before?” Jenny 2 asked as he took her hand in his and moved in close with the needle. “Why didn’t you let the biology guy take the blood?”
“I know how it works in theory,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to know the nature of this experiment until we are ready to go public.” He jabbed her finger with the needle.
“Ouch!” we both cried at once. We looked at each other, then at our fingers. Hers was bleeding, mine wasn’t.
“Did you feel that too?” she whispered.
“Interesting.” Stanton scribbled something in his notebook. “Does pain transcend time and space boundaries?”
“Hey, I’m bleeding here,” Jenny 2 said.
“Oh, right. Sorry.” He placed a thin straw over the wound and the blood was sucked up inside.
“How does that work?” I moved in for a closer look.
“Vacuum principle. Don’t worry about it.” He placed the straw in a vial and took a fresh needle. “Finger, please.”
I offered mine up and Jenny 2 took my hand, squeezing as the pain stabbed us both.
“All right, then. Get back under the table and play until the student has come to collect the blood and is gone. And don’t break anything! That is valuable scientific equipment, not toys.”
“Don’t you have a Band-aid?” Jenny 2 asked.
“Band-aid! Shoot!” He rummaged around in the kit. “No Band-aids. Here, use this.” He tossed us some duct tape. “Duct tape fixes everything.”
“The Duct Tape Principle?” Jenny 2 asked. I laughed. We scooted back under the table before he could swat us with something. We looked into each other’s eyes. Could she read my mind?
“Do you want to?” I asked.
“Yes. Let’s do it, quick.”
We held up our wounded fingers and pressed them together.
“Blood sisters,” I whispered.
“Not sisters,” Jenny 2 answered. “The same.” She touched her necklace. David had given it to us for our birthday last year. “Let’s trade.”
We took off our necklaces and put them around each other’s necks.
There was a knock at the door. We heard the professor give our blood to the unsuspecting biology student for analysis.
“I need a report back as soon as possible. Check for all possible DNA combinations, whether the subjects are siblings, twins, or the same person.”
“What kind of experiment is this?” the student asked.
“An important one. How fast can you do this?”
“We aren’t the FBI, you know. This could take time.”
“Don’t give me that B.S.! I’m a professor here, and I know exactly how what kind of grant your cruddy department gets! And it’s a lot more than the Physics department, I can tell you!”
“Whatever.” The guy left. Jenny 2 and I crept out from under our tables.
“Right,” Stanton looked at us as if we were a pepperoni pizza and he was starving. “Let’s get to those experiments.”
He performed more tests on us, thankfully no more involving needles. There was a mind reading test, where one of us would hold a card up and the other one would guess what was on it. Then there was a written word association test, where there would be one word: ‘air’ for example, and we would have to write what came into our minds. I wrote ‘head’ and drew an arrow towards Jenny 2.
Professor Stanton engaged in manic notebook scribbling. As the sunlight grew long in the room, he asked us questions about our upbringing, our friends and family. He was incredibly curious. We dutifully reported our favorite breakfast cereal, our shoe size, and rated all the recent movies we had seen on a scale of one to ten.
We agreed on everything. Everything that came out of her mouth sounded so right, so in sync with everything I had ever thought. All my insights were also hers.
But it was exhausting. An hour later we were both resting our heads on the desk, making faces at each other.
“Well, I think I’m finished.”
“About time!” Jenny 2 said. We sat up. There was a knock at the door. I looked at Jenny 2 and rolled my eyes. We collapsed under the desk as Professor Stanton opened the door.
“Is this a joke?” the biology nerd asked in a high, twitchy voice.
“What do you mean?”
“Or is it a test?” he asked.
“A test?”
“I can’t figure out why you would give us two exactly identical blood samples for analysis unless it were some kind of test.”
“Exactly identical,” Stanton repeated.
“So was it a test? Did the biology department pass?”
“Oh yes.” His voice came to us as though he was a great distance away. “With flying colors.” He shoved the student back out the door and locked it.
“Jenny?” he called. “Jennys?”
We emerged from our hiding place. “What is it, Professor Stanton?” she asked.
“Have you reached a conclusion?” I asked.
“It’s true. All of it. You both really are the same person.”
“We know that!” I exclaimed.
“We already told you that!” Jenny 2 said.
“You know it, of course you do. And I know that you told me, but it’s going to take me some time to get used to it.” He sat down and shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
“Professor? I’m sorry to interrupt your processing of the recent information, but we really need your help,” I said.
“That’s why we came,” Jenny 2 added.
“See, while the physics of the matter is really interesting, we can’t exist in the same reality.”
“That’s right. Which one of us would get the car? The job? The man?” Jenny 2 asked, then winked at me.
I brightened. “On the other hand…”
“No. Don’t even think it.” He straightened up. “You were right the first time. The two of you cannot exist in the same universe. It’s against the laws of nature. We have to do something, and fast.”
“Why fast?”
“Why can’t we stay together?”
“One of you made a jump. Think of it like this.” He drew the letter ‘Y’ on a piece of paper. “This is a branch of reality.” He pointed to the middle of the ‘Y’ where all three lines intersected. “This is where you made a choice, to pee or not to pee.”
“He quoteth Shakespeare!” Jenny 2 said.
He drew a curved line connecting the arms of the ‘Y’. “But something went wrong. It was like a great hiccup in the progression of time. See, in this reality, you did both. You went to the bathroom and yet you stayed on the couch. This was a relatively short jump because the decision was so minor. But it could effect everything.”
“So what will happen?” I asked.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. All bets are off. There are no laws of physics that apply to hiccups in the universe. At least not yet. But if I had to guess—“
“Yes?”
“What?”
“You both have made hundreds of decisions since this occurred. Look at it this way, one of you is the branch of the tree, the other is the vine that is curled around it.”
“I want to be the branch!” I cried. “You can be the vine.”
“Wait, I have to be Jenny 2 and you’re Jenny 1! So I get to be the branch.”
Professor Stanton rolled his eyes. “Whatever. So your branch/vine reality has already split several times. But I think what you need to separate your universes is a really big decision, a life-changing decision. The vine won’t be able to stretch over the bend in the branch.”
“So what happens to the vine?” I asked.
Stanton shrugged. “Like I said, all bets are off.”
Jenny 2 and I looked at each other. “I definitely don’t want to be the vine,” I said.
“Well neither do I!”
“One of you has to be the vine or else it won’t work.” Stanton said.
Jenny 2 smiled at me. “Flip for it?”
I nodded. “You call it. If you get it, you win our life in this reality.”
“Heads,” Jenny 2 said.
Professor Stanton produced a quarter. He flicked off his thumb. It spun around, the slanting pink-gold light of the setting sun glinted from it. I couldn’t pull my eyes away. It fell to the table in slow motion.
Tails.
Jenny 2 looked at me. Her eyes welled up with tears and she bit her lip. Such a familiar gesture. I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I knew how much she loved David, and I had grown to love her in the few hours we had spent together more than a sister. She was not just part of me, but the entire me.
“Hey, that wasn’t definite. We can still discuss this.”
She shook her head. “Professor Stanton is right. This situation could only get more difficult from here. This is the right thing to do.” She looked at him. “Isn’t it?”
He sighed. “I would love to keep you both.”
“Just think of the experiments you could run!” Jenny 2 said, and I laughed in spite of my own tears.
“Yes. And to explore this phenomenon further. It isn’t easy for me to do this either. I’m throwing the Nobel Prize away with both hands.”
I took Jenny 2’s hand. She beamed at me with shining bravery. “I’m ready now.”
“Right now? Can’t we spend some more time together? Go bowling? I know you love bowling.”
“Yes.” She laughed. “But we are terrible bowlers. I want the car, OK? It’s the least you can do, considering you get the guy.”
I nodded. “I’ll just say it was stolen.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I turned to Professor Stanton. “Will you come too?”
We left his laboratory together, all in the same envelope of sadness. We walked down to the car. The sun had set and the car seemed impossibly red in the shadow of early evening. Almost as if the car were more real than everything else surrounding it.
Jenny 2 and I reached for each other’s hands at the same time. We hugged each other tight. “I just wish I knew what was going to happen.” She whispered. “I just wish I knew that I was going to be all right.”
I shivered. I had no answers for her.
“In some realities, it may go horribly wrong and you may hurl violently back in time, or disintegrate into a billion pieces. But I’m sure that in at least one reality you will be all right.” Professor Stanton smiled.
“Is that supposed to be comforting?” She got into the car.
“Every choice is a risk,” he said. “In some realities you may even be better off than this Jenny here, who is getting married. Who’s to say what will happen? Maybe her husband will cheat on her two months from now and her life will also be blown into a billion pieces. Maybe--”
“All right, already!” I shouted. “We get the picture.” I turned to Jenny 2. “I don’t know how to say good-bye to you.”
She winked at me. “You don’t have to say good-bye to me. You are me.” She started the car. “But you do have to let go of the door handle.”
“Oh,” I said, taking my hand away. I hadn’t realized that I’d been holding it. I took a couple steps back to where Professor Stanton was standing. He put his arm around me. “I wish we had more time!” I called to her.
“The longer we wait, the harder it will be. But remember, in some realities, the coin never landed.” She raised her hand in farewell and drove off. As our car crested the hill, it didn’t seem to drive away but to fade away. Jenny 2 had just disappeared.
But that isn’t the end of the story. David and I got married, and of this writing are still happy with each other. He hasn’t cheated on me as far as I know. But sometimes I get a charge on my credit card bill that I don’t recognize from a place I’ve never been. Sometimes the phone will ring but when I pick it up there’s no one there. I think that maybe it’s Jenny 2, trying to reach me. I still see her, of course. Every time I look in the mirror. Then I smile and tell her that the sum of all possible histories means that anything is possible and that one day we will meet again.
I still have her necklace.
And it comforts me to know that somewhere in the universe the coin never did land on the table, and we did go bowling after we left Professor Stanton’s laboratory and maybe even had a coffee after. Just her and me, tucked in a corner in a trendy café, giggling about hiccups in the universe.