Infinite(17)

Dylan, come find me! I’m still here!

If I drowned myself, I’d be with my wife again. But my body betrayed me. As I ran out of air, I threw myself upward. My face burst from the water, and I gasped for breath, gagging and coughing. I opened the tub drain and listened to the loud, sucking slurp as the water went down. When the tub was empty and I was cold again, I finally climbed out and went back into the bedroom.

I needed to talk to someone about all of this. About my grief and my hallucinations. I needed answers.

I realized there was someone in the hotel who could help. Dr. Eve Brier—author, philosopher, and psychiatrist—was downstairs, and according to Tai, she knew me, even though I didn’t know her. I wanted to understand how that was possible.

“Don’t you know her?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s strange. She told me she picked the hotel on your recommendation.”

I got dressed again. I put on a navy blazer and black slacks, playing the role of hotel events manager. I made sure I was shaved, and I brushed my teeth and popped a few mints in my mouth to cover the smell of the bourbon. Then I headed to the elevators.

The hotel’s gold ballroom had a narrow second-story balcony that made a U around the palace-like space. From up there, people could lean on the elaborately carved railings and watch the wedding parties dance below them, or pretend that they were in powdered wigs and part of the court of Louis XIV. I let myself onto the walkway through a staff entrance and stayed discreetly at the back. No one was up here tonight. The action was below, in the darkened ballroom, with several hundred guests paying rapt attention to the woman illuminated on the stage.

Dr. Brier was dressed completely in black. Black pantsuit, black heels. In the stark spotlight, her head looked almost disconnected from her body, and her hands fluttered like flying birds as she gesticulated to the crowd. Her highlighted hair swirled as she walked from one side of the stage to the other. I could see the reflecting glint of her golden eyes like two faraway jewels. Her voice, through the microphone, had a mellifluous quality, the kind of singsong sweetness that could hypnotize you or seduce you, depending on what she wanted. It worked its magic. I didn’t think I’d ever heard our ballroom as drop-dead quiet as it was at that moment. Dr. Brier had these hundreds of people holding their breath.

“Think about what this means,” she told them, drawing out her words with a pregnant pause. “If we accept the Many Worlds theory as true, then our universe is constantly replicating itself, atom by atom, moment by moment, choice by choice. Every possible outcome of an event exists in its own separate world. We are all inching along on a single, solitary, fragile branch of a tree that grows infinitely larger with each nanosecond. As I leave the ballroom tonight, I turn left, but I also turn right. I go home, and I don’t go home. I kiss my husband, and I slap his face, and I have sex with him, and I stick a knife in his heart. In my consciousness, I only experience one of those outcomes, because I’m on one branch of the tree. But the Many Worlds theory tells us that all of those things happen in parallel universes.”

She paused. “Of course, I’m sure my husband is hoping I’m in bed with him later and not wiping the blood off my knife.”

Laughter rippled through the crowd.

“In fact, I’m not actually married,” she said, “not in this life. However, in a myriad of other worlds, I am. In other worlds, I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m an actor, I’m a cop, I’m a homeless drug addict. In other worlds, I’m not alive; I’m dead. And so are you. There are infinite copies of you in infinite worlds, making all of the choices you don’t make in this life. That’s what the theory says.”

Dr. Brier stopped in the middle of the stage.

“Is this crazy talk? The ravings of mad scientists trying desperately to explain why their elegant math doesn’t work in the real world? Well, maybe. Or maybe our vision of the universe is simply limited by what we can see. Until we had microscopes and could look at a drop of blood, nobody would have believed that there were so many other worlds living inside it. Millions of cells inside a single drop of blood! Impossible! But now we know it to be true. So is the idea of the Many Worlds an absurd theory? Or do we just need a better microscope?”

There was something magnetic about this woman. She wasn’t speaking to the audience as a whole. She was speaking to everyone in the room. Personally. Individually. Or maybe she was just talking to me, because that was how it felt. Standing on the balcony, I might as well have been alone with her in the giant ballroom. I felt her watching me. Staring up at me. Directing all her comments and thoughts to me. I expected her to use my name.

Dylan, you are not alone. You are part of many worlds.

You are infinite.

“Philosophers took this idea from the physicists and came up with their own theory,” Dr. Brier continued. “They called it the Many Minds. Their theory is that all these endless choices, all these parallel lives, really do exist—not in the big wide universe, but inside our individual brains. We’re the ones who divide like amoebas over and over. Still sound crazy? Well, think about your dreams. A dream is an elaborate world that your brain creates instantaneously. All that extraordinary detail devoted to building a fantasy place that only exists for a few moments of sleep, never to be visited again. If the brain can do that night after night after night, then maybe it isn’t so strange to think that it can build entire parallel worlds, too. No, for me, the important question isn’t whether it’s possible. The question is, What does this have to do with you and me and our actual lives? With our single little branch of the tree? Does any of this really matter if it’s all just theoretical? Because physicists and philosophers don’t agree on much, but they do agree on one thing. Whether it’s Many Worlds or Many Minds, we’re stuck on our own branch. Isolated. Powerless. Every version of yourself lives in its own separate world, and you can’t visit those other universes.”