Dark Matter(98)

The Jason on the screened-in porch with his throat cut.

And somehow, without so much as a tremor in her voice, she manages to ask, “Where is my husband?”

Jason2 looks momentarily thrown.

I wipe the blood out of my eyes. “Right here.”

“What did we do tonight?” she asks.

“We danced to bad country music, came home, and made love.” I look at the man who stole my life. “You’re the one who kidnapped me?”

He looks at Daniela.

“She knows everything,” I say. “There’s no point in lying.”

Daniela asks, “How could you do this to me? To our family?”

Charlie appears beside his mother, taking in the horror all around us.

Jason2 looks at her.

Then at Charlie.

Jason2 is only six or seven feet away, but I’m sitting on the floor.

I couldn’t reach him before he pulled the trigger.

I think, Get him talking.

“How’d you find us?” I ask.

“Charlie’s cell has a find-my-phone app.”

Charlie says, “I only turned it on for one text late last night. I didn’t want Angela to think I’d blown her off.”

I look at Jason2. “And the other Jasons?”

“I don’t know. I guess they followed me here.”

“How many?”

“I have no idea.” He turns to Daniela. “I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could’ve been. That’s why—”

“Then you should’ve stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance.”

“Then I wouldn’t have built the box.”

“And that would be so terrible, why? Look around. Has your life’s work caused anything but pain?”

He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”

Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”

So slowly, I transfer my weight onto my feet.

But he catches me, says, “Don’t even.”

“You going to kill me in front of them?” I ask. “Really?”

“You had such enormous dreams,” he says to me. “You could’ve stayed in my world, in the life I built, and actually lived them.”

“Oh, is that how you justify what you did?”

“I know how your mind works. The horror you face every day walking to the train to go teach, thinking, Is this really it? Maybe you’re brave enough to admit it. Maybe you’re not.”

I say, “You don’t get to—”

“Actually, I do get to judge you, Jason, because I am you. Maybe we branched into different worlds fifteen years ago, but we’re wired the same. You weren’t born to teach undergrad physics. To watch people like Ryan Holder win the acclaim that should’ve been yours. There is nothing you can’t do. I know, because I’ve done it all. Look at what I built. I could wake up in your brownstone every morning and look myself in the mirror because I achieved everything I ever wanted. Can you say the same? What have you done?”

“I made a life with them.”

“I handed you, handed both of us, what everyone secretly wants. The chance to live two lives. Our best two lives.”

“I don’t want two lives. I want them.”

I look at Daniela. I look at my son.

Daniela says to Jason2, “And I want him. Please. Let us have our life. You don’t have to do this.”

His face hardens.

His eyes narrow.

He moves toward me.

Charlie screams, “No!”

The gun is inches from my face.

I stare up into my doppelg?nger’s eyes, ask, “So you kill me and then what? What does it get you? It won’t make her want you.”

His hand is trembling.

Charlie starts toward Jason2.

“Don’t you touch him.”

“Stay put, son.” I stare down the barrel of the gun. “You’ve lost, Jason.”

Charlie is still coming, Daniela trying to hold him back, but he rips his arm away.

As Charlie closes in, Jason2’s eyes cut away from me for a split second.

I slap the gun out of his hand, grab the knife off the floor, and bury it in his stomach, the blade sliding in with almost no resistance.

Standing, I jerk the knife out, and as Jason2 falls into me, grasping my shoulders, I stick him again with the blade.

Over and over and over.

So much blood pouring through his shirt and onto my hands, and the rusted smell of it filling the room.

He’s clutching me, the knife still embedded in his gut.

I think about him with Daniela as I twist the blade and rip it out and shove him away from me.

He teeters.

Grimacing.

Holding his stomach.

Blood leaking through his fingers.

His legs fail him.

He sits, and then, with a groan, stretches out on his side and lets his head rest against the floor.

I lock eyes with Daniela and Charlie. Then I go to Jason2 and search his pockets as he moans, finally emerging with my set of car keys.