Multiversum (28 page)

The soldiers stood motionless, their eyes staring blankly into the air. In a split second, all the orders they'd received, all their training, the oaths they'd taken, the regulations to be respected — they all turned into nothing more than bland memories buried in time. There was only an overwhelming force that paralysed their limbs. None of the soldiers opened fire and, after just a few seconds, they let their submachine guns fall to the ground. Their arms hung limp at their sides, their gazes were lost in the luminous light, they stood side by side without moving an inch. They felt their muscles weighed down, frozen in place. There was no kind of training that could help them fight the force that was petrifying them.

They were in the magic place.

The magic place is me and Jenny, together.

33

Jenny and Alex stared at the surreal scene for a few seconds. Then, with nothing more than a glance and a nod, they both took off running in the same direction, racing past the bridge, leaving the soldiers rooted to the spot, desperately trying to figure out what was happening to them.

Incredible
—
it's as if we'd drugged them or something
, thought Alex as he ran towards the industrial district. The two of them cut through a one-way street that took them off the main road and into the neighbourhood, and they soon found themselves in an area with few residential buildings and lots of factory sheds.

‘Where should we go?' asked Jenny, as her breathing grew laboured.

‘We've got to hide.'

Alex was sure of one thing: the layout of the city in this dimension wasn't much different from the one he'd lived in for sixteen years. In fact, when he turned into a private laneway with a sign that warned it was a dead end, he still found the entrance to an underground passage he knew very well. A staircase led down into a graffiti-covered tunnel that ran under an old railroad line and came back up to the surface two hundred metres later. Down there, it would be hard for any army truck to find them.

They walked down the steps, then they stopped and sat down on the ground, their backs against the tunnel wall, where there was a piece of graffiti that read
Rebirth
.

‘It was Memoria, Jenny! What saved us was Memoria! Memory is me and you. It's the two of us together.' Alex kneeled before her. ‘I … I'd lost everything, every fragment of my childhood, because I was given shock therapy.'

‘Shock therapy? But who on earth would —'

‘It was my parents, Jenny. My parents did this to me. I know that it must seem crazy, but we're starting to figure some of this out. There's someone or something out there that wants to destroy us.'

‘Alex, I … no one ever subjected me to shock therapy when I was small. I remember my childhood pretty well, but then I started to hear your voice a few years ago, during my first fainting spells.'

‘Of course!' Alex's face lit up, his eyes still staring into space as he went over that incredible story again, rewinding the film of his own memories. Jenny watched him in silence, as if waiting for a verdict.

‘It's obvious,' he went on. ‘We've always been in contact because, before the shock therapy, I used to talk to the Jenny in my dimension. And I'd even met her once, right in that same Planetarium — in fact, I had a powerful sense of déjà vu when you and I walked in. But I'm guessing you've never been to Italy …'

‘Never, as far as I know,' Jenny said. ‘What does all this mean?'

Alex waited a few moments, looked her in the eye, and realised that the time had come to tell her the truth.

‘In my dimension … you died when you were just six years old.'

Jenny looked stunned, as if his words were yet to produce the effect that such an enormous revelation would normally have.

‘I waited to tell you, because things were already complicated enough …'

‘How do you know?' she replied in a cold, detached voice, looking away.

‘Do you remember when I told you that I'd seen the triskelion before? You weren't willing to talk to me anymore, but that's when you changed your mind.'

‘Yes.'

‘I saw it at your house. Actually, at Mary Thompson's house, if you want to know the truth. In my dimension, it's your nanny who lives there now. You died when you were six, and your family moved away.'

‘What the hell are you talking about? It can't be! It doesn't make sense! And … how… how could I be dead?'

‘Believe me, I'm not making any of this up. When I was little I was in contact with her. Not with you. I know it's crazy, it sounds like I'm talking about two different people.'

Jenny chewed her fingernails, irritably, and turned her back on him. On the wall in front of them another piece of graffiti said
Foreverlove
, all one word, with gigantic rounded letters.

‘Then who am I?' asked Jenny, turning to look at Alex once more.

‘When I got my telepathic powers back, six years after the shock therapy, I hadn't been able to get back into contact with the Jenny in my dimension because you were … she was dead. But somehow, it seems, there's something of her still in you, or you both shared something that allowed me to go on communicating with you after she died.'

The girl leaped to her feet. She looked like she was about to run away.

‘Jenny,' Alex called to her, sensing her fear, her rejection of that inconceivable truth. ‘We don't have much time left.'

She ignored him, so he went over to her, took her by the shoulders, and forced her to turn around and face him, more roughly than he had intended to. Their eyes locked deeply for an instant.

Alex's vision blurred. His eyelids began to quiver as a photograph took shape in his mind. A photo in a frame. The outlines of a human figure began to appear in the rectangle. It was a girl. She wore a one-piece bathing suit, dark blue, with the number seven on her chest. Alex looked down. There was a podium. The girl was standing on the highest level. It was Jenny.

All at once he felt as if he had been sucked into the photograph. He didn't know how it had happened, but he was standing on the podium. He could see through the eyes of the champion. He admired the crowd of friends and relatives that were cheering her name, while the banner in the distance said
21st School Challenge
. Behind the people, he could glimpse a swimming pool divided into eight lanes.

Alex tried to shake his head, but he felt as if he were paralysed in that memory.

Then everything went dark, and he had to wait several seconds before he could focus on a few shapes again.

There was a tree. A line of trees. Shifting his gaze to the right, he saw a well-dressed middle-aged couple. Behind them were some younger people, also nicely dressed, in black formal wear. Even further off to the right, a parish priest was dragging his cassock over the muddy soil, his shoes squelching into the muck. In his hands he held a metal container with incense pouring out of it. He stopped next to two holes in the ground. Next to each hole stood a coffin, ready to be lowered by a group of adults standing by. A woman came over, blew her nose, and through her tears said: ‘Your grandparents loved you very much …'

Everything went dark again. One after another, a number of blurry images overlapped. Landscapes. People. Increasingly vast landscapes. People, bigger and bigger.

Seconds of silence, darkness. Nothing.

At last he saw it. The memory that he was searching for. This time he watched it as if it were a scene in a movie rather than experiencing it himself. The voices were muffled but clear enough to understand, the colours and outlines almost too realistic.

‘Mary, are the cookies ready?' shouted little Jenny, kneeling in the living room with her arms braced against the sofa. Coloured pencils were scattered across the floor. She was leaning over a blank sheet of paper.

‘Almost, my love, almost ready …' the woman called from the kitchen, even as the little girl started singing a nursery rhyme about a bear and a squirrel.

‘Mary?' she called.

‘Yes, little one?'

‘Do you know that yesterday I was in the magic place?'

‘Of course I know that, my kitten. You told me that last night before falling asleep.'

‘No I didn't, that's not true, I'm telling you now! Did you know that that place isn't a real place?'

‘I think you told me about it once before.'

‘That's not true, hmmpph … liar, liar, liar! You don't know what the magic place even is, you've never been there. And anyway, it wouldn't work with you! I have to be there or it won't work …'

‘Oh, it won't? And why not?'

Mary Thompson reappeared in the living room, holding a tray with two steaming cups of tea and a bowl full of chocolate biscuits.

‘Biscuits! I can't wait
.'

‘So why do you have to be there in the magic place?'

‘Because the magic place isn't really a place! See
,
you don't know
.'
The little girl laughed. ‘I have to tell you all about it, because you don't know anything
.'
The laughter stopped, and the little girl started dunking a biscuit in her tea.

‘Then why don't you tell me all about it …'

‘The magic place is everything around me and Alex, when we're together. Everything turns nice. And it all happens in here,' said Jenny, pointing to her head.

‘I see … that's wonderful. But you've already told me about it once.'

‘But that's not true! It's all right … I forgive you. These are really good biscuits, Mary.'

‘Thank you
.
I'm glad you like them.'

‘I love them! But this tea is horrible! Did Mummy buy it?'

‘No, princess, this tea is one of my specialties. But you shouldn't say such mean things about it …'

‘Yes, but it's so … bitter
.
It has a funny taste.'

‘Drink it, darling, drink it up
.
It's good for you.'

‘Afterwards, will you tell me the story about the big dog that … that … Mary!'

‘Yes, little one?'

‘Ma-Ma- … Mary … I can't breathe …' The little girl started to cough
,
and her face turned red, then purple, as she reached for her nanny
,
who was smiling calmly as she went on sipping her tea. The tea in the cup that she hadn't poisoned.

‘There's the memory that you were missing …' said Alex, exhausted.

Jenny looked at him in a daze, as if she'd been hypnotised. Slowly she recovered, but her head felt as heavy as a rock, and a series of stabbing pains shot through her from side to side.

‘Just as I thought.'

‘What's … what's just as you thought?'

‘Now it's in my memory, Jenny,' Alex said, while a shock ran through their bodies, and their eyes locked once again.

‘You can see for yourself,' he said, under his breath. ‘Look inside me.'

He knew that she would see everything.

The underground tunnel turned dark, and Jenny's mind was uprooted and swept away, as if there were a very powerful magnet in Alex's thoughts whose force she could not resist. Suddenly, she saw herself as a little girl, suffocating and then collapsing to the floor while her nanny watched her, without lifting a finger, teacup in her hands. She was filled with a sense of vertigo and fell to the ground, nauseated. Then she opened her eyes.

‘That's not possible!'

‘I know it's upsetting …'

‘No! No! It doesn't make sense! Mary … she always adored me!'

‘Perhaps someone drove them all to it. Mary, my parents … I think there's something big behind all this.'

‘God … it's crazy. In your reality I was murdered. I can't believe it!'

‘Calm down, Jenny … you're with me now.'

Jenny spun around at the sound of a siren echoing in the distance. She started to stand up, but Alex grabbed her arm.

‘Wait. You haven't seen it all,' he said aloud. She looked at him in amazement, and then their eyes locked one last time.

Jenny saw the drawing.

She saw the Malaysian fortune teller.

She saw Alex and Marco, sitting in the living room in front of the computer, talking about the end of the world.

When Jenny opened her eyes again, she was too weak to speak. There was nothing left to say.

‘Now you know it all. Let's get out of here.'

34