The Map of Chaos (Trilogía Victoriana #3)(135)

At first, the brutal onslaught of images and sensations that plagued them daily left them in pain and bewildered, with no time to reflect on what was happening to them or to elaborate any kind of response. Once again, they had to resort to laudanum in order to sleep, and the days turned into a long succession of indescribable torments. It was like living inside an iron maiden, feeling the sharp spikes piercing their bodies without touching any vital organs. I can’t bear it any longer! Chop off my head! they would cry out to each other. And yet, gradually, as they had done with the sensation of randomness, they managed to contain the deluge of multiple perceptions that threatened to overwhelm them. How? You may ask, dear reader. Well, that is not easy to explain without resorting to metaphors: Imagine that an immense cosmos lives inside every skull, a cosmos largely uncharted, and that Wells and Jane were able to create a magic hole in their consciousness, a kind of conduit through which they transmitted that vast amount of information to the farthest reaches of their minds. Naturally, that information bubbled ceaselessly inside their brains, like an infinite cluster of meteorites hurtling toward a vortex of darkness; but, depending on the day, they were more or less able to habituate themselves to it. And so, ten years later, both were able to state categorically that they had at last managed to control this gift, which they would never have known they possessed had they not left their own world.

Not only did they become accustomed to it, they also succeeded in perfecting their technique. If they concentrated hard enough, they could momentarily close the magic hole pulsating at the center of their mind and capture one of the infinite worlds careering toward it. For a brief moment that world rescued at the last moment floated gently in their consciousness, blotting out all other perceptions. The Observer couple were thus able to spy on the lives of the twins in that world, as if through their own eyes, before the image dissolved. They realized immediately that, ironically, this curious game brought them relief from the intense concentration they had to maintain at all times, because while the hazy world they had ensnared bobbed placidly inside their heads, the deafening roar created by the other worlds subsided.

Once they had discovered this, the couple started to spend the end of their almost invariably exhausting day sitting beside the fire, trying to connect with the mind of one of their twins. They would pour themselves a liqueur and, sipping it slowly, close their eyes. After a few moments’ concentration, voilà, they found themselves inside the head of another Wells or Jane, seeing his or her world through his or her eyes and ensconced in his or her most intimate thoughts. It was like setting anchor in someone else’s soul, except that this someone was him or her, or a possible version of him or her. After the spell had worn off, when the image of that world dissipated and they opened their eyes again, each would tell the other about the lives he or she had glimpsed, like making up stories round the fire, beautiful bedtime stories. And as each tried to captivate the other with the astonishing twists and turns in the story of their lives, they also revealed the secret universes their twins had hidden inside them, that private realm no one else can ever fully penetrate. And so, besides bringing them precious moments of calm, those stories allowed Wells and Jane to get to know each other in a way no couple ever had in any of the possible worlds.

As you will doubtless appreciate, dear reader, for the first few years, when the majority of their twins were still very young, the stories they told each other were little more than amusing, childish anecdotes, like when Wells told Jane that one of his twins would steal his father’s cricket bat and use it to have swordfights with his brothers, or that most of them had decided to practice their handwriting by scrawling the word “butter” on the kitchen window. However, the timepieces on some of the stages were running slightly faster, and as many of Wells’s twins grew up, fell in love with one of their students (invariably the same frail young girl called Amy Catherine Robbins), and married her, their thoughts and innermost desires gave rise to absurd arguments between the Wellses. Observer Jane wasn’t pleased to discover that several of her husband’s twins had decided to win her over simply because they thought her liberal ideas and lack of inhibitions would make her a passionate bedfellow. Indeed, she was so upset by it that Wells had to remind her that he wasn’t responsible for his twins’ actions. Notwithstanding, Jane had stopped talking to him for nearly two whole days, and she was aware of a delicious burning sensation in her guts, something every angry lover invariably felt, but which she was experiencing for the first time.

It was while trying to describe those new emotions more precisely that the miracle occurred: without realizing it, they were taking the opposite path to the one they had been following in their world. Thus they ended up feeling the powerful emotions they were exposed to. They loved each other in infinite different ways, with infinite different results, only to discover that there was only one true way of loving: when two hearts beat as one. When that happened, nothing else mattered, Jane finally admitted, having discovered to her astonishment that many of her twins accepted that their respective husbands took lovers, provided the women they chose pleased them—in other words, that they posed no threat to their marriages. Her only request (which he fulfilled out of a respect for the truth?) was that he didn’t fall in love with them. Afterward, when Wells left them, in some of the universes she herself wrote them long letters of condolence.

In the meantime, in this universe it was Observer Wells who had to take the blame for his dissolute twins.