Infinite(74)

He told me to meet him at six o’clock at a bar just off the Kennedy on Montrose. The location he picked felt like another test. This was the bar where I’d gotten drunk and wound up in a street fight with a man who was abusing his girlfriend. Roscoe had come to collect me from the police station, and he’d never made it home alive.

The fact that Roscoe was alive meant that evening had gone differently in this world. And yet the fact that he chose the bar as our meeting place told me that the location still had some kind of special significance for Dylan Moran.

When I got there, I didn’t recognize the bartender, which was probably a good thing. If anyone knew me here, I doubted they would serve me. I sat at the end of the bar and tried to hold back the flood of memories from that night. Me confronting the man four seats down, his girlfriend telling me to mind my own effing business, him throwing a drink in my face. It was a karaoke bar, and I could still hear someone doing a painful rendition of “Coma” by Guns N’ Roses as the soundtrack to the fight.

“You want a drink?” the bartender asked me sullenly. She was an Asian girl with cherry-red hair.

“Vodka rocks,” I said. Then, as she walked away, I stopped her. “Hang on. Forget that. Just club soda.”

She shrugged. “Whatever.”

When she brought me the drink, I sat and nursed it with a clear head, and then I ordered another. I tipped her like I’d ordered Grey Goose. The bar began to fill up as the after-work crowd arrived, and people came and went over the next couple of hours. By six fifteen, Roscoe hadn’t shown up, and I began to wonder if he was planning to pretend that I’d been a figment of his imagination.

However, at six thirty, he slid onto the seat next to me. His eyes took note of the club soda, but he didn’t offer to join me in my sobriety. Roscoe had always been a Southern Comfort man, even as a priest, and he still was. He ordered it on the rocks and said nothing until he had it in his hand and had taken the first sip.

“I drove by your office,” he said. “Although I guess it isn’t really your office, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Dylan was inside. I saw him. Then I drove straight over here, no stopping, and here you are. I needed to see it with my own eyes, know what I’m saying?”

“I do.”

He shook his head. “Many Worlds, Many Minds. I looked it up. The whole thing sounds pretty crazy to me.”

“That’s how I felt about it, too. But that’s what’s happening to me.”

“You’re a different Dylan. I mean, you’re the same, but you’re different.”

“That’s right.”

He eyed me as he sipped his drink. “It’s easier to believe when I really look at you. You’ve got a different edge, no doubt about it. It’s in your face, your eyes, how you hold yourself.”

“I met another Roscoe who told me the same thing.”

“You’re more like my Dylan was a few years ago. He’s changed since then. You? Not so much. You haven’t found yourself yet, not the way he did. Although I like the not drinking part. That’s a start.”

“You’ve changed, too,” I told him.

“Let me guess. In your world, I’m a priest.”

“You were.”

He laughed to himself. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I’d taken that path. Maybe we all do that.”

“Believe me, I’ve been obsessed with that idea recently.”

Roscoe nodded as he looked around at the bar. “I asked you here for a reason, you know. This place right here is where my Dylan’s life changed.”

“Mine, too.”

“So tell me what happened to you here,” he said.

I picked up my club soda and swirled the ice, watching it clink around the glass. “Four years ago, on the anniversary of the night my parents died, I came here. I got drunk, and I got into it with a guy who was calling his girlfriend names. The cops came and arrested me. When they let me go, I called you, and you came to pick me up.”

Roscoe knew there was more. “And? What happened next?”

“There was a car accident. You died.”

A blink was his only reaction. He took another sip of Southern Comfort. “Oh.”

“I blamed myself.”

“Of course you did.”

“There’s more. I met a woman that night. It was a coincidence, a weird twist of fate—or at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I don’t know. She rescued me. She helped me recover. We got married. Then very recently, I lost her, too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Roscoe glanced at me from over the top of his drink. “What was her name?”

“Karly. Her name was Karly.”

“Did you love her?”

“Yes, I did. I can’t imagine my life without her. I finally had everything I ever wanted, and I let it all slip through my hands. I screwed up my whole damn life, and now I can never get it back.”

I slammed my glass down on the bar. Ice and club soda sloshed over the side. I shook my head and dabbed at the spill with a napkin, and I waved away the bartender, who was looking at me with concern.

“You still have that temper, I see,” Roscoe murmured.

I drank what was left of the club soda. “So that’s my story. What happened here? In this world.”