Multiversum (22 page)

The digital clock on the wall in front of him said it was 2.00 a.m. A cleaner was pulling a blue-and-yellow cart towards the toilets. The colours reminded Alex of his basketball team's jersey.
Better stay on my guard this time
, he thought as he set out to wander the English airport, deserted at this time of night. He had the power to cross between dimensions — there was no longer any doubt about that — but it was a power that he could only partly control and that, for the most part, manifested itself without his having any say in the matter.

He checked the signboard that indicated the departures scheduled for the next morning: a flight for Milan's Linate Airport was scheduled for 6.50 a.m. In his backpack pocket, he still had the debit card from Marco, loaded with money. This time, that money would take him back home.

After looking through the windows of every shop along the way, Alex went back to the boarding area and took a seat. His thoughts went straight to Jenny.

She was probably still at the Planetarium with an Alex who looked exactly like him, but who wasn't him at all. He wondered what would happen when the other Alex woke up that morning, an Alex who — in all likelihood, though he couldn't say for sure — knew nothing of Jenny or the Multiverse.

At about six in the morning, he went up to the ticket counter and paid for the flight, hoping that the trip wouldn't have any surprises in store this time.

‘At last, my Milan!' Alex exclaimed as he walked out of the Linate terminal, but right away his thoughts steered him back towards an old fear. He couldn't as yet be certain that he was in the right place. First he had to talk to his parents. And to Marco.

Exhausted and still in a daze, he used the last of his cash to take a taxi home.

‘Let's hope we're in the right Milan …' he whispered to himself as the taxi driver went onto the highway and started punching the buttons on the radio, which seemed unwilling to tune to any station, offering an annoying staticky buzz on every frequency.

When he found himself outside the entrance to number 22, Viale Lombardia, Alex heaved a sigh of relief as he read the name
Loria
on the intercom. He rang the bell, even though he had his keys in his backpack.

‘Yes?' his mother's voice responded. He hadn't expected to find his parents at home, since it was almost ten in the morning.

‘Mamma, it's me.'

‘Oh my God! Alex!'

His parents welcomed him back as if he'd just been released by kidnappers. The minute he walked into the apartment, Valeria threw her arms around his neck, hugging him in a grip that almost suffocated him. As she sobbed and mumbled incomprehensibly, she caressed the back of her son's head, stroking his hair with a combination of love, relief at seeing him back in one piece, and a pent-up anger from all those days of waiting.

Giorgio witnessed the scene with his arms crossed, standing there with a cigarette in his mouth. The look on his face was the product of the tangled emotions he was experiencing. His brow was furrowed, and he had the expression of someone who now expected some answers. When Valeria freed Alex from her embrace, his father blew smoke out of his mouth, his lips pressed tight.

‘Now you're going to tell us just where the hell you've been. And don't try to make up stories.'

‘Yes … okay,' Alex replied.

As he was setting his backpack down on the floor, he glimpsed a copy of the
Corriere della Sera
lying on the kitchen table. It was the paper from the day before, and a headline blared from the front page:
Terror of the Unknown
. A photograph of a brawl in the Italian parliament covered the top of the page. There was a two-line caption in italics:
Tensions have risen in the wake of the internet blackout. ‘The government must give the citizens answers,' protesters have demanded in streets and squares all over the country. Conflict and clashes are happening around the world
.

Alex sat down at the kitchen table, while Giorgio picked up the newspaper and waved it furiously in the air. ‘I mean, have you seen what's going on? How do you think we felt?'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘We have no use for your excuses and your
I'm sorry
s,' his father said immediately. ‘Now tell me where you've been!'

Alex glanced around in search of a way to avoid his father's glare, as it dawned on him that he hadn't prepared so much as a shred of an excuse, even a barely plausible one.

‘I had to …' Alex looked down at his hands, knotted together in his lap. ‘I took a trip. It was necessary.'

Valeria sat down in front of her son while Giorgio remained on his feet, his hands clasped behind his chair at the head of the table.

‘You took a trip? To where? Have you lost your mind or something?'

Alex cleared his throat, buying a little more time to think. ‘I don't know what else to say. And no, I don't think I've lost my mind.'

‘No, you're going to talk to me now!' Giorgio slammed his fist down on the tabletop. His cheeks were flushed. He loosened the knot of his tie and then started again: ‘Or do we have to get it out of your friend Marco? Because we know for sure that he's the one who covered up for you. I was on the verge of calling the police: it was clear from the start that that nutcase was behind this escapade!'

‘Cut it out!' Alex shouted as he looked up to challenge his father. ‘Marco isn't a
nutcase
. He's a genius. You couldn't understand, you don't know anything about anything.'

‘Try to understand our point of view, though,' said Valeria as she got to her feet too.

‘I'm done talking to you two. I have nothing more to say.'

‘You have to give us an explanation,' Giorgio broke in, fuming with rage. ‘You have to give us an explanation or, so help me God, I'll lock you in your room until the end of the school year.'

Alex sat in silence, staring into space, determined to ignore his parents' attacks.

‘So you're trying to be the tough guy, huh?' Giorgio went on. ‘Get the hell out of my sight or I'm going to take my fists to you.'

Alex slowly stood up, without a word in response. He grabbed his backpack and left the kitchen. He headed for the bathroom and tried to decide what his next move would be.

When he found himself face to face with his reflection in the mirror, he placed both hands on the edge of the sink and lowered his head. With his eyes closed, he sensed that the burden of the situation was getting too heavy for him. But this was no time to lose heart, to tremble or cry. This was the time to get up and get out of there.

He lifted his head and met his own gaze in the mirror.

I'll find my way back to you, Jenny
, Alex thought as he ran some water in the sink and splashed it on his face, the way he always did first thing in the morning, just after waking up.

I'll come back to you …
he kept saying to himself in his mind, like a chant.

‘Wait for me, Jenny,' he said in a low voice, as if he were talking to his reflection in the mirror.

Just then, behind the half-open bathroom door, Valeria Loria's eyes were brimming in the dark hallway.

She'd heard that name.

She and Giorgio knew exactly who that was. Alex couldn't possibly remember.

From the deepest recesses of his memory, from the door bolted shut at the end of the darkest corridor in Alex's mind, Jenny had come back.

When Alex came out of the bathroom, there was no one in the hallway. With his backpack slung over his shoulder, he approached the heavy front door as he heard the muffled voices of his parents, who were having a heated discussion in the kitchen.

Alex wrapped his fingers tight around the door handle and pulled it open with determination. When the door was behind him, he let out a long sigh. Then he ran downstairs and left the apartment building, heading straight for Marco's place.

27

‘It's not possible.' Valeria Loria's voice was trembling with disbelief and worry. ‘Could it be happening again?' she asked Giorgio as she sank into the leather armchair in the living room.

‘The doctor had told us that he couldn't rule out this possibility entirely … do you remember?'

‘Like it was yesterday. Just like I remember the walls of our house, before we had them painted to cover up his scribbling: they were overrun with that damned name, Jenny. And that cursed symbol — it was everywhere!'

‘My God, Giorgio. How many years has it been now? I prayed and prayed …'

‘Ten. Ten years.'

‘Wait here, I have to do something. I'll be right back.' Valeria left the kitchen and grabbed a small key ring hanging from a wooden cabinet next to the front door. The label on it said
Cellar
.

As she walked downstairs towards the basement, cold air drove forcefully into her nostrils. Memories surfaced one after another, bringing back a story that she'd worked so hard to bury deep.

Valeria remembered that time perfectly.

Alex was in Year One. The other children were drawing verdant landscapes, houses, and trees, and they would transform the sun into a happy smiling face. Alex did his painting and drawing by himself, in his own room, depicting apocalyptic scenarios, cities in flames, apartment buildings crumbling and collapsing. When they asked him why he'd drawn these things, he would simply reply: ‘This is what I saw.'

Valeria turned the key in the padlock on the cellar door and walked in. Their storage unit was at the end of the corridor, on the right. When she reached it, she was reminded of Alex's guileless face, with that angelic shock of blond hair, as he kept saying over and over again, like a chant: ‘Jenny's real, Jenny's real, Jenny's real …'

Every episode of that darkest chapter in their family history was noted down in Valeria's journal. She'd started keeping that journal the day after he was born, and she'd hidden it away when that grim story came to an end. When she and Giorgio had taken action, because something had to be done. Because they had to bury alive a monster that was devouring their beloved boy's childhood.

While Valeria was pulling a cardboard box out of the cellar, Giorgio was in the living room. He'd pulled out an old address book and opened it to the entries starting with C. He'd run his finger down the list of names until he'd come to the one he was looking for:
Clinica Privata Enrico Paoli
.

Written in pencil on the line below were the private number of a Dr Siniscalco and, in parentheses, the word ‘neurologist'.

Giorgio sat down on the sofa, picked up the cordless phone, and dialled the number for the doctor's office.

After a couple of rings, a receptionist's voice answered. Giorgio had to wait for a few moments before the doctor took the call from his extension.

‘
Pronto?
'

‘Dr Siniscalco,
buongiorno
. This is Giorgio Loria speaking.'

At the other end of the line, the only response was a silence barely broken by the doctor's heavy breathing.

‘Ten years ago you treated my son Alessandro.'

‘What sort of treatment?' The neurologist spoke with the voice of someone who had started smoking as a teenager.

‘A psychiatrist, Dr Moriggia, had referred us to you.'

‘Ah.'

Giorgio guessed from the neurologist's monosyllabic response that he must have remembered not just some but all of the painful circumstances surrounding their prior meetings. Speaking to Dr Siniscalco again, thinking back to that dark chapter of their life, was like flicking on a torch in a room lost to memory.

The flashbacks overwhelmed Giorgio, sweeping over him with the fury of a cyclone.

The walls of the apartment defaced with magic markers. The floor of Alex's bedroom, where the boy had carved with a knife the three spiralling half-moons whose meaning was still a mystery to Giorgio and Valeria. The folders with his drawings, filled with scenes straight out of a horror movie.

‘Signor Loria, are you still there?'

‘Yes, please excuse me … I was just saying, do you remember? We'd come to see you for the …'

‘… for the electroconvulsive therapy,' said the doctor, finishing the sentence for him.

‘That's right. So you remember Alex?'

‘A blond boy, with an angelic face, am I right?'

‘Yes, angelic … but tormented.'

‘Unless my memory misleads me, the therapy had the desired results.'

It was true. Alex had gone back to drawing trees, children, and houses, like all his friends. After the treatment, it seemed that his life had returned to that of an ordinary six-year-old. ‘Yes, he'd even stopped saying the name of that imaginary girlfriend of his.'

‘And you no longer had to send him to see Dr Moriggia, am I right? Everything went back to normal.'

‘Exactly right, doctor.'

‘But from your tone of voice, it sounds as if the problem has resurfaced. How is Alex?'