Multiversum (19 page)

‘I have no idea what it means, but something strange happened to me today: it was as if I could read people's minds,' said Alex, giving voice to a thought that was whirling in the middle of the telepathic bridge that united them.

‘The same thing happened to me. In the train. A little boy looked at me, and it was like he'd told me about a memory he had.'

‘Pictures appeared in your head, right?'

‘Yeah. As if it were a scene out of my past, not his.'

‘It's incredible. Marco told me this would happen. Becker was right … we're developing a power.'

‘But this Memoria you mentioned, assuming it really exists … we don't even know where to start looking for it, right? We don't even know why the man calls it that.'

We'll find out
, thought Alex as he took her hands. Jenny looked down and smiled, putting her arms around his neck.

He leaned closer and closer, wanting to capture her gaze. Then Jenny looked up and found herself in Alex's eyes.

An endless moment.

Alex felt lost. All around them, streets, houses, and the city itself vanished.

There was nothing but a void, and they were at the centre of it. Their lips drew close, brushing each other, and the fingers of their hands intertwined. Alex and Jenny began to kiss, as the cold air reddened her cheeks and stung his face.

While they were kissing, Alex brushed Jenny's neck with his hand, and his fingers touched the the chain that held the triskelion. Alex opened his eyes and looked at the magic pendant. He remembered that the same symbol had belonged to the little girl Jenny in his dimension, the child who had died when she was six.

‘This amulet …' he said, as he thought back to the vision he'd had in Mary Thompson's house. ‘You've always worn it, haven't you? Ever since you were small.'

‘It was my grandmother's — a gift from my grandfather. The other day, when you told me you knew about the triskelion, I realised that you weren't just a hallucination.'

‘No, I'm not at all.' Alex smiled.

Jenny waited for a few seconds, enchanted by that complicit grin, then she gave in: ‘I like kissing you … you can't imagine how many times I've dreamed of it. I can't believe that it's all really happening.'

Alex shook his head. ‘We've been searching for each other all our lives, Jenny,' he said, and kissed her again.

With her head resting on Alex's shoulder, Jenny opened her eyes. She saw a line of people entering a domed building a short distance away. ‘Where are they going?'

Alex turned to see. ‘The Planetarium.'

Jenny smiled. ‘The stars: that's what always guided me.'

‘The stars brought me to you,' added Alex. Then he stood up.

‘What are you doing? Where are we going?'

‘To see the stars, no?' Alex replied with another grin as he headed towards the Planetarium.

In the lobby, there was a large poster in front of the ticket window:
Destination: Stars — Schools Project 2014 — Free Admission.
Underneath the text was an enlarged photograph of the white luminous strip of the Milky Way, cutting diagonally across the celestial vault.

As the audience spread out in the auditorium and sat down, Alex continued to feel that strange sense of disorientation, but he still couldn't put his finger on what was causing it. Jenny quickly surveyed the circular rows of red seats, which were arranged to ensure that everyone in the audience could see the speaker's podium at the centre. Then she identified two seats that seemed a little more secluded and took Alex by the hand. The room's maximum capacity was three hundred people, but that day there might have been forty or so at the most. Jenny sat down and looked at Alex with a glow in her eyes.

In the churning mix of emotions that the adventure was producing inside him, Alex found it almost absurd that they were able to carve out a moment of normality for themselves. He put his arm around Jenny's shoulders as the lights went out, leaving the audience to contemplate the stars overhead.

The speaker took his place at the podium and clipped a small microphone to the lapel of his jacket.

It was at that exact instant that Alex remembered everything.

‘We've been here before …' he said in a low voice as he closed his eyes and retrieved a scene from a long-buried past — the very scene that, for the past few minutes, had been producing an unprecedented sequence of déjà-vus in his mind.

In that memory he found both himself and Jenny. But their outlines were blurry, the people in the scene seemed very large, and they were looking down on them from above. The stars were nothing more than a cluster of ordinary lights, and a group of children was making noise on the far side of the auditorium, making it almost impossible to hear what the speaker was saying. The man's explanations were difficult to follow, and the topics were all boring.

Alex tried to orient himself in that memory. Suddenly it was so vivid, so clearly defined, that he could analyse it like a picture in an old photo album. Jenny was holding his hand. Alex turned to look at her and saw her nose tilted up as she said: ‘I know that one, it's Andromeda. My dad always used to tell me stories about the stars …'

Alex tried to make out her facial features, but it was too dark. Only the image of the sky above them offered a little faint light. But it was enough to see that neither she nor Alex could have been any older than four that day.

They were both children, sitting hand in hand in the same Planetarium where they were now looking around.

But in another corner of the Multiverse …
thought Alex, the minute he opened his eyes.
We were in my original dimension. And that was the same Jenny who, later, when she was six …

He stopped. He did his best to clear his mind. Jenny was sitting right next to him and could hear his every thought. He had no intention of letting her know that in his world, she'd already been dead for ten years.

Think about something else, come on, think about something else.

Fortunately, Jenny was looking up and admiring the stars projected on the Planetarium vault, and didn't notice a thing, but that effort prompted a sudden tremor down his spine, like a cold shiver. His head flopped to one side while his body sat rigidly in place. As if he'd suddenly fallen asleep while trying to erase all his memories from his mind, to stop himself sharing them with Jenny.

Alex's mind was suddenly sucked into the vortex, rocketing through a tunnel of indistinct emotions, images, and sounds. Far from Jenny, far from that world. When he emerged from that tangled and confusing kaleidoscope, Alex opened his eyes again and found himself trying his best to focus on his surroundings. It didn't take him more than a couple of minutes. In his original reality, he had left his body on the beach in Melbourne.

But right then, there was no sand in sight. There was no ocean.

Where the hell am I now?

24

Alex looked around.

He was in the middle of the street, in a semi-abandoned plaza not unlike the one that had been turned into a city-run basketball court back in his own world. Every now and then, he'd arrange to meet some guys from other classes and play a few games there, even though his coach had forbidden them to play casually around town — he was afraid that one of his valuable players would come limping back with an injury that would sideline him for the rest of the season.

Alex looked down and examined his body.

He was wearing a pair of jeans and a torn shirt. He ran a hand over the back of his head and realised it had been shaven clean. He pulled a wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans. In it were some banknotes that looked completely unfamiliar to him and an assortment of papers. He saw his own picture on an ID card and, under it, the name Karl Weser.

Dazed and baffled, he instinctively started to try gleaning some information about his alternative life, the way he had in the locker room. As he was straining to do so, he started walking. He turned down one street and saw that in the distance it ran under an overpass. As far as he could see in every direction, there were piles of rubble, giving the impression that a bomb had just gone off. Alex also noticed smoke rising from fissures in the ground, as if the asphalt had cracked in the aftermath of a violent earthquake. In the distance, he could see parked cars going up in flames.

This looks like my city … but what's happened to it?

Alex started to remember something about his alternative identity. All at once, a jumble of information surfaced: a civil war of some kind, armed clashes in the streets, bomb attacks, and wholesale massacres. He remembered a Milan in the throes of a fully-fledged uprising that had thrown the city into disarray and undermined the authorities, with assassinations of leading political figures. As he walked towards the overpass, he remembered that, in Rome, the Vatican City had been burned. What he had learned about this world over the past few minutes was shocking, to say the least. He wanted to run away, but where would he go? Suddenly, he heard voices, far behind him but growing louder.

They were shouting and screaming. Alex turned around but there wasn't a soul in sight. A blanket of smoke blocked his view. All he could see clearly was the bridge behind him: it reminded him very strongly of the overpass at Milan's Lambrate station.

When he was finally able to make out the figures of a few people, he froze in his tracks. He felt as if his blood had stopped flowing.

A horde of people was marching straight towards him. They were wearing hooded black outfits and carrying weapons of all sorts: rifles, clubs, pistols. Every one of them had managed to lay their hands on something. And they were all screeching in an indistinguishable chorus of rage.

The decision was instantaneous. Alex started to run. He had a head start of at least two hundred metres. He turned around more than once to make sure that the ragtag army wasn't gaining on him, but the distance between them seemed to stay the same. At a certain point he spotted a flight of steps leading down to a lower level. It looked just like an entrance to the metro station, though there were no signs. Alex remembered that the underpass crossed the plaza and came out in front of Lambrate station. As soon as he reached the bottom of the staircase, he realised just how different things were in this parallel universe: the underground tunnel was littered with dozens of corpses.

Wherever he turned, Alex could see bodies that had been mutilated, their faces ravaged — a massacre. It was all the same along the entire length of the underpass. Meanwhile, the voices were getting closer. The mob had almost caught up with him, the fastest ones already on the steps. Alex started to tremble; a clammy sweat broke out all over him. His legs were numb, as if they'd decided to stop responding to his commands. He was terrorised. He kneeled down, ready for the worst that could happen.

He closed his eyes and, for a brief moment, tried to retreat into himself and think of Jenny, of her beauty. He imagined her eyes and tried to conjure up their first kiss in his mind. In a few instants he relived all the images of that incredible journey that had taken him to the other side of the world, and then into an unknown dimension, to meet her. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

‘Wake up, Alex,' Jenny whispered.

His head was lolling to one side. The speaker was explaining the origin of sunspots when Alex opened his eyes with difficulty, only to see the darkness of the auditorium. Jenny's hand lay on top of his.

‘Finally … What happened to you?' she said softly.

‘Who … who are you? What do you want?' He sat erect and stretched his back and neck as if warming up for exercise.

Jenny recoiled in surprise. ‘What did you just say?'

‘Where am I?'

‘Alex … it's me, Jenny. We're at the Planetarium. You must have fallen asleep.'

‘Hey, hey, just wait a second. We had phys ed, we played, then we went to get changed …'

‘What are you talking about? Is this some joke?'

Alex stood up suddenly, and he seemed upset. The speaker interrupted his lecture briefly as Alex quickly made his way down the line of seats and out the exit. Jenny ran after him. Outside, she caught up with him.

‘What the hell do you want from me?' Alex shouted, turning around to face her.

Jenny had a horrified expression on her face. ‘How could you possibly not … We were here together, don't you remember? On that bench.' She nodded in that direction. ‘In fact, we even …'

‘I don't know you. And the last thing I remember is getting changed in the locker room right before heading back to my last class. And now I wake up sitting in the Planetarium, with some girl I've never met before who claims to know me. What have you done to me? Did someone drug me? What's going on?'

Alex spun on his heel and strode away. Then he vanished through the gate leading out of the Porta Venezia gardens.

‘Alex, please … you can't do this to me,' Jenny shouted.

He didn't even turn around.