Infinite

by Brian Freeman

“Feast or famine,” the cop said again. “That’s been us this season. May and June were dry as a bone. Been driving the farmers crazy. Land’s hard as a rock. We get a storm like this, and all the water just runs off into the creek. The banks ain’t made for that much rain that fast.” He was right. My grandfather grew up in the flatlands of North Dakota, where the waters rose every spring with the snowmelt, and he used to warn me about rivers. Never trust a river, Dylan. Give a river even half a chance, and it’ll try to kill you. I should have listened.

“The two of you live in Chicago?” “Yes.” “What brought you down to this part of the state?” Dylan, let’s go away for a few days. I know you’re upset and angry, and you have every right to be, but we need to start over.

“You got a way to get home to the city?” Warren asked me. “Family or friends or somebody who can pick you up?” I didn’t know what to tell him. I had no family, not really. My parents died when I was thirteen. That’s the clinical way I describe it to people, which is easier than saying that my father murdered my mother and then killed himself right in front of me. After that, I moved in with my grandfather. Edgar’s ninety-four now and doesn’t drive. We get along, but we don’t get along, if you know what I mean. It’s always been that way.

Dylan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I made a stupid mistake. Can you ever forgive me? “What?” I asked. “How was your marriage?” “Our marriage was fine,” I lied. Which was a foolish thing to do. People knew what had happened. Karly had told her mother about it. I’d told one of my coworkers. And yet I couldn’t say out loud to this police officer that my wife had cheated on me.

A man. A man stood barely ten feet away on the riverbank at the edge of the rapids. When the lightning flashed, I saw him clearly. There was no mistaking what I saw, and it didn’t matter that what I was seeing was impossible. All I could do was shout to him. Beg. Plead. That man was my lifeline. I needed him. He could save Karly.

Yes, I was lying, but I couldn’t tell her the reason. I couldn’t tell her about the man I’d seen, because I had no way to explain it to myself. You’ll think I was imagining things, and I probably was. I was panicked and oxygen deprived, and it was night, and it was raining. On the other hand, I know what I saw. I was the man on the riverbank. It was me.

I took the elevator to the lobby. The LaSalle Plaza was one of downtown’s grand old hotels, dating all the way back to the White City days of the Chicago World’s Fair. You could feel turn-of-the-century ghosts here, passing you with a brush of silk. The lobby glistened with marble floors, a chambered ceiling, and elaborately decorated archways of glass, brass, and stone.

Karly was bawling. Not making a sound, but crying so hard she could barely breathe. Not me. Back then, I was cried out. “I should have been able to stop it,” I said. She threw her arms around my neck and told me what people had been telling me for years. “You were a kid. You were just a boy. What could you have done?” Yes, what could I have done? I’d asked myself that question every day since I was thirteen. I’d never been able to find an answer, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. No matter how much you wish or pray, there are no second chances. All you can do is make peace with your mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s no manual to tell you how to do that. Now, years later, I felt as if I were living in a kind of infinite loop. They’d all died because of me. My mother. Roscoe. And Karly. Every time. Every single time it was the same. I should have been able to stop it.

I know what you’re thinking. I was in the midst of a panic attack. That’s the explanation for what happened next. My grief, my anger over Edgar, my hyperventilation, my face in the mirror—it all came together, and I began seeing things that weren’t there. Maybe you’re right, but that’s not how it felt. It felt real. As real as it had been when I was drowning in the river.

The encounter lasted only a second, and then he turned casually away and disappeared into the next gallery. But I’d seen him. I’d seen myself. My profile. My face. Just like at the river. That was Dylan Moran studying La Grande Jatte and wearing my father’s murder coat. The shock of it left me paralyzed, but he didn’t look surprised to see me at all. It was as if he’d been waiting for that moment, waiting for me to find him.

“Are you talking about the Many Worlds theory?” Alicia asked. I chuckled in surprise. “You’ve heard of it?” “Of course. Most scientists have.” “Is it legit?” Alicia shrugged. “Many physicists believe it is.” “Parallel universes? How the hell does that work?” “Well, this isn’t my field, but as I understand it, the math of quantum mechanics creates a strange paradox. According to the math, particles have the ability to exist in two different states at the same time. However, whenever we look, we only see one state. That’s the problem.” “Let me guess,” I said. “This is about Schrödinger’s cat.” “I’m impressed, Dylan,” she replied with a smile. “Hey, I watched The Big Bang Theory.”

Roscoe eased his foot onto the accelerator and started across the intersection. He was distracted, and he forgot to look right. If he had, he would have seen the headlights of the truck coming down the one-way street and barreling through the stop sign. I was off in my own world and didn’t see it either. “Buddy, you’re not your father,” Roscoe told me. That’s the last thing I remembered until I woke up and saw Karly’s face.

I’d made too many mistakes in life, too many bad choices. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t think I deserved to have those bad choices lead me to someone like her. Sooner or later, I expected her to see who I really was, and that would be the end of us. When she slept with Scotty Ryan, I felt as if she’d finally proved me right. I didn’t want any explanations. That whole weekend in the country, I refused to listen. Until the last night. Until her last words.

“I’m really sorry,” Scotty said, which covered a lot of ground. “You can’t imagine how sorry I am.” “You should be.” My verbal blow rolled off him without causing any damage. He brushed his hand through his thick hair, and I could see the glow of sweat on his face. “I can’t believe she’s gone. I’m crushed. I’m sure you must be, too.” “Wow. You think?” Scotty shrugged his wide shoulders. “Hey, it’s hard to tell with you, Dylan. Karly always said you kept things locked up tight. You never showed her anything. That drove her crazy. No offense.” Because adding “no offense” made everything better, coming from the man who’d slept with my wife.

“And there you were, with a shoulder for her to cry on.” “You think Karly was the only one turning to someone else? She said you told your assistant Tai more than you ever told her.” I felt slapped. “There was nothing between me and Tai. There never was. Karly knew that.” “Did she?” “Don’t try to put any of this on me.”

I hit Scotty because I knew he was right. I’d let Karly die alone.

Without Roscoe, without Karly, I didn’t think I’d ever felt more alone. They’d gone on to other worlds, and I was still here. However, when I opened my eyes again, I realized that I wasn’t alone anymore. He was with me. I can’t tell you how I knew. I didn’t hear footsteps on the trail. I didn’t see anyone watching me. The trees were close in around me, and the gray sky made it seem like night. A stranger could have been six feet away, and I wouldn’t have seen him. But someone was on the other side of the fence, hiding on the riverbank the way I used to do when I was a kid. Like he knew this was where I’d go. Like he’d been waiting for me to come here. I tried to be patient, to stand there like a statue in silence and see if he’d show himself.

I looked around to be sure that no one else was nearby. Just him and me. My hallucination. My mental breakdown. “I know you’re there,” I called to him in a low voice. Then I added for the hell of it: “Talk to me.” I waited for an answer, but I didn’t expect to get one. Hallucinations didn’t talk back. Even so, by speaking to him, I felt as if I’d taken a leap into a rabbit hole, and I had no idea where it would lead me. “Who are you?” I asked. I still got no reply. The silence around me was punctuated by the patter of rain on the leaves. Then, like a statue coming to life, a voice spoke from the darkness. My voice, as if I were on the radio, when you can’t believe that’s how you sound to everyone else. “I’m you.”

I shouted at him. “Why are you here? Tell me!” This time, my shadow man answered. He whispered from the trees. “To kill.”

“Do you want some company?” she went on after a brief pause. “There’s nothing but Lean Cuisine and Prime Video waiting in my apartment. I still have that thank-you bottle of pinot the Walkers gave us. I could bring it up, and we could talk. Or not talk. If you want to just sit there and drink and look at the lake, we could do that, too.” “Not tonight.” “Look, I know you may feel like it’s better to be alone, but that’s not always the best thing. Sometimes it helps to have a friend there with you. Someone warm, someone who cares.” As if her meaning wasn’t clear enough, she made it even clearer. “I can stay all night if you want, Dylan. As a friend. That’s all. I really have no expectations. But if you need to be close to someone, I’m here.” I was tempted. Not because I’d ever been attracted to Tai, not because I wanted sex, but because I liked the idea of having a real person with me, keeping me sane. I was afraid of being alone and of what would happen to me next.

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.”

After her speech was over, I waited in a long line to meet her. This whole event was about selling books. She’d written a self-help book, using the hook of the Many Worlds, Many Minds theories to give it a sexy twist. The idea was to teach people to lead better lives by showing them how to “visit” the alternate choices they’d made in parallel worlds.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Brier, but you must have me confused with someone else. As far as I know, we’ve never met.” “I see.” She glanced at the people still in line on the other side of the stage, and then she swept her long hair across her head. She signed the book with a flourish, added a little note, and then handed it back to me across the table. As she did, her fingertips grazed mine. “My mistake,” she said. “Enjoy the book.” I walked away in a daze. I glanced over my shoulder to see if she was watching me, but she’d moved on to the next person. I left the ballroom and found a bench near the elevators, where I sat down and opened the book. Below her signature, she’d added a note. The fountain. 1:00 a.m.

I wasn’t alone. I saw a homeless man wrapped in a blanket on one of the benches near me. From behind me, I heard the sultry breaths of a couple having sex in the shelter of the trees. Near the fountain, two silhouettes whispered to each other, and I saw something pass from one hand to another. Drugs.

“I’m serious,” I told her. She studied my face carefully, as if looking for a lie. “Say the word,” she said finally. “What word?” “You know.” “I don’t. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Infinite,” she said. “Say it.” “Why?” “Say it,” she repeated like an order. I shrugged. “Infinite.” Dr. Brier eased back on the bench. I didn’t know what she expected would happen, but nothing did. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, as if the lake breeze was making her cold. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked her. “You seriously don’t remember me?”

Eve frowned. “You could be suffering from multiple personality syndrome. Your mind has split into different versions of yourself. One Dylan doesn’t remember what the other Dylan has done. I never saw any signs of that, but other personalities can be very convincing. I guess it’s also possible that my treatment made your condition more severe.” “Treatment?” “Yes. You were my first patient in a new experimental protocol I developed. I call it my Many Worlds therapy.” “What the hell is that?”

That’s why I had you say infinite. That’s our code word, the signal that triggers your brain to end the session. Wherever you were, whatever world you were in, you could say that, and you’d be back with me. I wanted to see how you reacted to the idea of saying it.” “I didn’t react at all, because it meant nothing to me.” “Yes, that’s interesting. I’m not sure what to make of that.”

I was seeing myself. Talking to the other version of myself. Somehow, my brain was bringing my second personality to life, and what I knew about that personality scared me. When I was him, I didn’t know what I was capable of doing. Why are you here? To kill.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked. “Nothing. I love you, that’s all.” “I love you, too.” It was hard to imagine a more perfect moment, but looking back, I knew that very day was when things had begun to fall apart for us. I could draw a line from our lunch in the dollhouse to her foolish affair with Scotty Ryan to the last speech she’d given me that weekend in the country.

Susannah looked around at the dollhouse and gave me a numb smile. Maybe loss always brings self-reflection. “I don’t know if this is the right place to do that. I think Karly felt like a doll herself when she was here. Artificial. Unreal. A plaything. That’s my fault. The truth is, she was never really happy until she met you, Dylan. And if you sometimes felt that I didn’t like you, maybe that was the reason.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing at all.

Where are you? Then I saw it. A light came and went in our downstairs apartment. It lasted only for a moment, like a flashlight turning on and off, but it was enough to give him away. He was there. He was inside. Soon after, the shadows in the glass seemed to change shape. He’d gone to the window to look out. To look for me.

Dylan, come back to me! I had to force away my wife’s screams. Where was he hiding? I listened, but wherever he was, he was frozen stiff, a statue, waiting for me to make the first move.

Stop it! I couldn’t think about Karly now. I needed a weapon. Something. Anything. I went to the kitchen counter and grabbed the butcher’s knife from our wooden block, but when I slid it out, I hissed in shock. When I held the knife high in the air, I could see that the blade was bathed in dried blood. I knew what it was. Scotty’s blood. I was holding his murder weapon in my hand. Leaving my fingerprints. But wouldn’t they be mine anyway?

He hadn’t escaped. There were no places to hide in the rooms I’d checked, so that told me where he was. I squeezed the handle of the knife even tighter in my hand. I retraced my steps and went back to the bedroom doorway. This room, so normal and familiar, now terrified me. I had to fight away memories again. Karly and I had made love in that bed hundreds of times, but it had been weeks since our bodies had joined together.

“I know you’re in there,” I whispered. This time, unlike in the park, he didn’t answer me. It made me think for a moment that I was wrong. That I was crazy. Then I slowly closed my hand around the doorknob, and with the knife ready in my other hand, I pulled hard. The door didn’t open. I yanked again, but as I put pressure on it, someone on the other side responded with an equal pressure in reverse. I couldn’t move the door. It stayed closed. He was every bit as strong as I was. In fact, if I thought about it, he was exactly as strong as I was. We were in equilibrium, with the door fixed like a wall between us. But he was inside, and I was outside. He had nowhere to go, no way to escape. I didn’t understand the point of this game. And then I did.

“Sir? Can you tell me what the problem is?” “I’ve been a bad boy,” he told the operator, drawing out the adjective with a smirk in his voice that was meant for me. “I need to be stopped.” “Sir? Are you in danger? Is it someone with you who’s in danger?” “Everyone near me is in danger. I kill people. I murder them. I stab them. I drown them.” He put an emphasis on that last one, and I felt myself ready to be sick. I pulled at the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. I wanted to shout, to say something, but my throat felt paralyzed with shock. I couldn’t get out the words. “Send the police,” he said again.

I was alone, and my doppelgänger was gone. I was the only one here. Dylan Moran, who’d just confessed to murder. Dylan Moran, who held a bloody knife in his hand.

“I think you’re wrong. I think your therapy opened the door, and somehow another Dylan Moran walked through it. He’s a killer. The police showed me photographs of the women he killed. Four of them—all of them look just like Karly. Now he’s gone somewhere else to do it again.”

Eve frowned. “What do you plan to do about it?” “Follow him and stop him before he kills anyone else.” “Into the Many Worlds?” “Yes.” She shook her head firmly. “You can’t. The rules say that even if you find him, all the choices come into play. That means you can never stop him. There will always be a world where he gets away.” “Maybe, but the rules also say you can’t jump between timelines. He’s breaking the rules. For all we know, he’s the only Dylan who has figured out how to do that.” “What if he stops you? What if you don’t make it back?” I stared at the city around me. My city. My home. “I’m done here, Eve. There’s nothing for me anymore. Roscoe is gone. Karly is gone. When the police catch up to me, I’ll spend the rest of my life in prison. It doesn’t matter whether I come back.” “This won’t work,” Eve insisted. “You can’t actually cross over to these worlds.”

I tried to imagine a world in which my father hadn’t killed my mother. A world in which they’d both been with me as I grew up, in which my father didn’t drink and took me places and made me a part of his life. I knew nothing else about this Dylan next to me, but I already knew that I envied him. I began to understand what Eve Brier had warned me about. You might be tempted to stay.

“What happened to my dad? Did you see it coming?” Edgar looked at me as if I’d started speaking a foreign language. We never talked, and we definitely never talked about that. He chewed on the question like it was a bad shrimp, and I didn’t know if he’d actually say anything or just pretend that I’d never even brought it up. “No,” he told me finally. “No, I never saw it coming. Your dad was an angry drunk, I knew that. And things were bad between him and your mother. But I never thought he’d go that far. Definitely not.” “Do you hate him for it?” Edgar sighed. “Hating my son’s not in the rulebook for parents. No matter what he did.” “Well, I hate him. I hate that I’ve lived my whole life afraid of becoming him. Every time I get angry, I think, ‘This is the moment when I snap.’”

Edgar shook his head. “Affair? What affair?” I realized I had never told him what Karly had done. “It’s not important. Not anymore.” “Look, Dylan, you feeling sick or something? You’re not looking good.” “Yeah, I’m a little out of it. Sorry.” I shut up at that point. My experiment in opening up to Edgar hadn’t exactly gone smoothly, and I didn’t need to argue with my grandfather on top of everything else that was going wrong in my life. I let him go back to Nighthawks.

There’s something different about you today. I thought about Edgar telling me that I’d spent my whole life with my emotions shut off, when in reality, the opposite was true. I thought about the old woman with her dog on the street, who didn’t remember me, even after telling the police that I’d killed a man.

Roscoe came from the north transept in his black suit, a Bible and a small leather notepad in one hand. It was the first moment that I believed, truly believed without any doubts, that what was happening to me was real.

I was not the Dylan Moran that this Roscoe Tate had grown up with. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew that something was wrong. “This is very odd,” he said. “What is?” “Well, you’ve changed. I can’t put my finger on how.” “It’s just me, Roscoe.” He shook his head. “No. No. There’s definitely something new.”

Trauma. It scared me to hear that word, and I wondered what it meant. He assumed I knew something about Karly that I obviously didn’t. Something terrible. I realized that the more I said, the more it would become clear that I didn’t actually know her. Not in this world.

Eve Brier had already warned me. You might be tempted to stay. Roscoe had feared the same thing. They were both right. I’d come to this world to stop a killer, but now that I was here, I found myself wondering: What if I really could find Karly? Could we be together again? Could I have what I’d lost? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want that, but it gave me a sick feeling to think about rebuilding my life over the decomposing body of another Dylan Moran.

I checked the listing of poems included in the book. The one-word titles unsettled me. One was called “Cut.” Another, “Plaything.” Another, “Jump.” Another, “Candy.” When I flipped through the pages, I was impressed but also horrified. Her poems used beautiful imagery to build a tableau of violent self-destruction, like Thomas Eakins painting the blood of a nineteenth-century surgical procedure in exquisite detail. It seemed impossible to me that the Karly I knew could have written these poems. I’d never seen a side like that in her personality. But then again, this was not the Karly I knew. I also thought about the word her faculty colleague had used in describing her background. Trauma.

Knowing it was her, knowing what she’d been through in this life, made the words almost unbearable to me. All this naked emotion roared off the page. Fury. Lust. Savagery. Ecstasy. Coldness. Guilt. Despair. “Plaything” was about bondage with a series of strangers. “Candy” was about her overdose of pills. “Jump” was about standing on an eighteenth-story Marina City balcony, naked and high as a kite, hallucinating that her mother was shouting from the ground below that she should climb over the railing. Jump, she said to me. Jump, she sang. I told myself that this was a different Karly, not my Karly, not the woman I knew, but I realized something as I read the book that made me impossibly sad. This was my Karly.

Bushing played with the pencil between his fingers. “Then let me explain it to you. The fact is, in this city, some murders are more equal than others. Ten black kids get shot on a holiday weekend, nobody seems to blink. But a pretty white girl gets stabbed in a park? People notice that. They see it in the paper; they remember it. It tends to generate a lot of tips. Most of them go nowhere, but every now and then, you find a needle in a haystack.” “You’ve lost me,” I said. “Well, see, a tip came in late last night. Someone in campus security at Northwestern called us. Seems a grad student reported a strange man stalking her near one of the residence halls. She gave a pretty good description of him, too. That kind of thing wouldn’t typically make it onto our radar, but the security guy remembered the photo of Betsy Kern from the newspaper. He said the two women looked a lot alike.”