Reality is only a Simulation
I first realized we lived in a simulation last March.
After surveying a line of code and picking at it until it resembled something workable, I shut my laptop for the day and prepared for my commute— the few hundred square feet between my home office and my kitchen. We software engineers were first-movers on the remote work thing, and I’d been doing it contentedly and rather productively well before the pandemic.
I liked the solitude. It granted clear thinking, and there was no unnecessary “water cooler” talk with people whose company you had to pretend to enjoy, as you listened to opinions you didn’t have the vulgarity to consider. One mutual skillset does not make a bosom pal.
That’s why I froze halfway down the hall when my phone lit up, heralding a call from Gene. What in the hell could Gene want?
I didn’t realize I even had his number saved. Sure, he was a nice enough guy, but he worked in the front-end process of app development, while I was hired to secure the back-end security of the company’s various projects. Our necessary interactions could, and previously had always been, contained in a weekly, perfunctory, thirty-minute meeting between both our teams. Should any topic fail to be broached, at worst, he tells his boss who tells my boss. No further interaction between us was necessary, and our lives go blithely on.
I debated not answering, sending the call to voice mail, but it felt like some external force compelled me to slide my thumb across the screen and utter a hoarse, “Hey there, Gene, what’s up?”
“Marco, I was hoping you’d pick up. I— is now a good time? Am I disturbing you? I hope I’m not disturbing you…”
In fact, he was disturbing me; he was crossing a perfectly obvious boundary, one which needn’t be traversed. Not only was it after five, but one could argue he was breaking the necessary and obvious chain of command by reaching out to me directly. I had half a mind to tell him so, but something in his voice jarred me to my core, and I put it off.
“No, no. Not at all. What can I do you for, Gene? I don’t think I’ve seen you since that company picnic last year.”
“Oh, yes. That’s right. Um, it’s… I don’t really know how to say this. You have to understand, you’re—,” a heavy sigh quivered gently across the line. “Would you meet me for a beer? Please? I know we don’t ever talk, but you’re the only person I can think to talk to about this, and I really need someone to talk to. Please, Marco let me buy you a pint. Please.”
Although he was technically asking my consent for this meetup, his pleas brooked no option for consideration on my part, no socially polite parry. Through the phone, his desperation felt like a contagion, as it was clear something in his life had led to this embarrassing act of hopeless entreaty. There was nothing to do but meet up with the guy.
I found him in a dank corner of a pub off 57th Street where we’d agreed to meet. His face looked more haggard than his voice had sounded over the phone, his eyes darting in their sockets, looking at nothing and everything at the same time.
“Good God, Gene, what’s happened?” And why on earth have you made me of all people an accessory to it, I wanted to add.
“I don’t even know how to say it,” he said, worrying the straw wrapper in his fingers. Then he looked up at me, apparently beset by some bright, new idea. “You have to promise you won’t think I’m crazy if I tell you.”
Agreeing to an outcome before being given the full scope of the situation’s facts didn’t sit right with me, and I meant to say so, but once again, as if at the whim of some external force, I found myself promising against a judgement of insanity, prematurely.
This show of faith seemed to fortify him. “Alright well, if you promise.” He eyed his beer, then chugged it for added fortification. “I think I’ve lost my wife,” he said.
Oh, so it was one of those calls, was it? Man takes his wife for granted one too many times, deaf to her grievances until there’s a note on the door and a packed suitcase on the stoop. But why, I couldn’t help wondering, would he enlist me as the sympathetic ear?
“You think you’ve lost her?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“But there’s still hope, it sounds like. One grand gesture of romance could turn this whole thing around,” I said, trying to relay an air of optimism to this sad sack in front of me.
“No, Marco, you don’t understand. My wife hasn’t left me. I— I think I was married before, but now I’m not. I have a memory of this woman— of my wife, but she’s been completely erased from my life. No pictures, no stray hairs shed by the bathroom sink, no nothing!” Suddenly his eyes were completely focused, boring imploring holes into me with their fervor. “I can remember her face clearly. Do you remember her, Marco? You met her at the company picnic last year. You spoke at length to her because you both grew up in Pittsburgh. You remember her too, don’t you? You have to! I’m sorry. I can’t go to my family. To my friends. They’d think I’m looney. And her family… well, I don’t— I can’t find them.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. And here I was thinking marital strife was beyond the scope of my powers of assistance. His face was searching mine for some clue to his sanity, an anchor into a reality that I could corroborate for him. I tried to think back to last July. It seemed so long ago, now. Was there a woman with him when we stopped and chatted? The possibility couldn’t be ruled out, but the certainty fortified by a clear memory didn’t present itself either. Conversation of a mutual upbringing in Pittsburgh eluded me. Hell, earlier this evening Gene’s name appearing on my phone screen took a moment of willful retrospection before I placed him.
His incessant staring was grinding me down. He needed an answer from me.
“I seem to recall you were with someone else,” I answered slowly. “It could have definitely been a woman.”
Immediately his demeanor was suffused with an unabashed joy. With my words, I had saved him from a destiny worse than damnation: the knowledge that the reality he’d experienced was his alone.
…
In the weeks following our exchange, I didn’t know what to do about Gene’s claims. Mostly I considered him a pitiable case study, someone to remind me of how much worse life can get. Something about his clutching at this fictional past infused me with the nurturing spirit. I called him every week to check on him and see how he was holding up. That camaraderie alone might buoy someone’s psyche, but he insisted that my confidence in seeing his wife at the picnic was what kept him going.
Despite my doubts, I couldn’t stand to burst his bubble. Telling him I had no memory of any woman at his side that day felt not only immoral but violent to me, like I was at once inviting him to the realm of insanity while also holding the door for him on the way in. He’d saddled me with the burden of being his confidante, but there was a part of me— a shameful part but a part all the same— that was obsessed with how Gene’s story would end. What would a man’s descent into oblivion look like? Would his destruction occur slowly, like a dying star or would it occur all at once in some great explosive display? Whatever the answer, I had to find out.
After some back and forth over the phone, I found myself in his cramped studio loft. I couldn’t help but note the lack of a feminine touch in the apartment’s décor. It was hardly a space that could accommodate two people comfortably either, another tick in favor of the insanity hypothesis. I stopped in my tracks as Gene showed me the kitchenette where he so distinctly remembered Collette cutting onions and laughing about how much she was crying, then crying from laughing hysterically.
What was I doing? Was I genuinely interested in playing detective on this case, weighing the data for and against his claims from a removed perspective, some poor approximation of objectivity? Nothing about my life so far lent any credence to this man’s experience being remotely possible.
I followed him to the living room where he pulled out a photo album from beneath the coffee table. He flipped through pages and pages of photographs, depictions mainly of foreign tourist traps, sunsets he assured me were lovely in person but that didn’t translate to print, and scenic overviews that peeked out just above highway guardrails. There were photos, however, that struck me as odd.
“Look here,” Gene said, pointing to one. “Do I strike you as the type of person to travel to Vietnam alone? Yet here I am, posing awkwardly in front of the Bahn It Towers, completely by myself.”
I examined the picture, and against all my best judgement I found myself agreeing with him. His arm was extended to his side in an unnatural way, his palm facing the camera and perpendicular to the ground. At first glance, it appeared he was inviting the viewer to have a look at something behind him, but what it really looked like was the embrace of some invisible person, no longer there. Shudders traveled up and down my spine, and I quickly changed the subject.
“What’s rent like over here? Pretty manageable?” I asked.
He sighed and closed the album. “I suppose. It was much easier with another income to supplement me. I may have to move out if she doesn’t come back soon,” he said.
….
Gene was fired shortly after. He’d become so obsessed with his missing wife that he understandably let his focus settle on her disappearance, leaving no energy for coding. Deep down, I worried the same thing would happen to me, and I let his phone calls go to voicemail for a week or two, trying to distance myself from the horrific mystery with which he’d cursed me. The doubts ate at my mind like a stubborn parasite, until the nature of reality itself began to unravel around me. Suddenly, the slightest lapse in my memory or life’s smallest coincidences became glaring indications of the inconsistencies in the tapestry of reality’s space-time.
I began digging deeper. Since I could complete my work to a reasonable standard in about two hours, I used the remaining time to search the web for anyone else that had experienced something like Gene. The more I read, the more disquieted I became. I would pinch myself and walk laps around my apartment to feel truly alive, the weight of gravity against my soles enough to assuage the transient panic attacks. I began spending more time in coffee shops, the comfort of a crowd’s indistinct murmurs acting as a cool salve against my existential sunburn.
In the message threads, people made all sorts of fantastic claims. Once I read about a woman who insisted, to a chorus of assenting comments, that she had a distinct memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison, despite the fact of his survival and subsequent successful bid for presidency being well documented. The woman didn’t seem to blatantly deny that particular reality occurring; she posited only that the other reality had occurred in a different timeline, and the memory was left over in her brain somehow. This was met with countless other anecdotes of similar phenomena.
I read one line in the thread: “If Curious George didn’t have a tail, then I didn’t have a childhood. I read about that monkey every night before bed.”
A curious thing happened, then. At the same moment that I read the word, “monkey,” a customer sitting two tables over said the same word, simultaneously. It was not a few seconds before or a few ticks after but exactly coinciding with my brain’s production of the word from the screen in front of me. Why would he have said “monkey?” How often would a word like that come up in conversation, and what are the odds that it could occur at the exact same time I happened to read the word, in the very coffee shop out of which I happened to be working?
My hair stood on end, and a wave of nausea washed over me. I started looking around for something physical that could pull me back from this precipice I was teetering over, but no such thing presented itself. I closed my laptop so hard I thought I broke the screen, and I quickly departed in a mad scramble. Back at my apartment, I let out a sigh of relief, now comfortably detoxed from the message board. It was just a coincidence, I told myself. A minor, run-of-the-mill, everyday stroke of Serendipity’s brush.
…
As a software engineer, the idea of reality being one big program spoke volumes to my logician’s penchant. The more I read, page after page, article after article, the more the thesis became understandable, then creditable, and finally probable. While humans may be trapped in space-time like mosquitos in amber, that didn’t mean that everything in the universe had to be. I searched for books on quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and even religious perspectives on the nature of reality that could explain what Gene and all these people on the message boards were experiencing.
One day I finished the last book I’d checked out from the library on quantum entanglement. It revealed to me experiments proving that two particles could be entangled on either side of the universe, meaning a shift in the rotation of one would immediately be reflected in the other, even across billions of light years. If this didn’t undermine the idea of a physical universe, then I didn’t know what new branch of science would need to be discovered to do so.
Quickly, electrified by this new understanding and unsatisfied with my current knowledge, I dashed to the nearest bookstore off Jackson Heights to sate my informational hunger.
I must confess, I was picturing the sort of civilization that could program a world as complex as this one, generating images according to the number of observers embedded in the simulation, when my wandering reverie was interrupted by none other than Gene.
“Marco, isn’t this a coincidence. I’m so glad I’ve run into you!”
“What are you doing here? You don’t live anywhere near Jackson Heights,” I said, gawking rudely at him. Coincidences were beginning to stink of offal left out in the sun these days.
“No, I was just out for a walk is all. Listen, I’ve got something to tell you.” He glanced around at the busy passersby, then back at me conspiratorially. “You know, about the… about Collette.”
What was he doing here? He lived nowhere near, a brisk hour and ten-minute walk from his apartment. What were the odds?
“Funny you mention that. I think I may have cracked the code. Literally.”
We settled on a halal cart across the street for lunch and shared our stories like two neanderthals around a fire, returned from their expedition. Gene went first.
“I realized the hardest part about this whole thing is the memory of Collette persisting in my mind. Well, that’s just it. It’s a partial memory, buzzing around my ears at every waking moment of the day. Like some word that’s just on the tip of your tongue, you know? It’s enough to drive anyone bonkers.”
I nodded, seeing the logic in what he said.
“So, I decided to go to a hypnotherapist. To unlock some of those memories. I thought maybe if I could have the entire picture somehow it would be easier to let go.”
My lip curled, a worm of condescension. “What’re you doing messing around with hokey stuff like that?”
“I’m telling you, Dr. Rison unlocked things in me I could never have come up with on my own.” He must have registered the look on my face. “Look, Marco, I remember everything about this woman. Her birthday, her hometown, her pet peeves. Christ! I remember she used to wear these socks with a dog on them, and on the toes, they had a dog’s tongue flopping around when she walked. I have full memories of the stupid arguments we had about those socks because I told her she was going to trip on the novelty tongue one day and that she’d regret not listening to me and she said she’d never trip on the dog’s tongue because the dogs loved her.”
He stared at me intently. I kept my face devoid of expression.
“You know,” he fumbled, “those silly arguments couples have with each other, neither side giving ground. Forget it. I was wrong anyway. She’ll never trip over the tongue now. It just proved to me beyond a doubt that all this happened, that’s all. I feel vindicated.”
“That’s great, Gene. Really,” I paused, trying to consider the best way to broach my newest idea with him. “I’m glad you’re healing from this, but… wouldn’t you want to see your wife again?”
He stared gravely over his chicken and rice, his face a mosaic of severe lines. “What are you getting at? She’s gone. Poof. She is not my wife in this reality. Believe it or not, Dr. Rison has dealt with this sort of thing before with other clients. She says it’s paramount to move on and embrace this reality for what it has to offer. She said, ‘a life lived in the past is a life of imminent expiration.’ I have to move on, Marco. For my own peace of mind.”
What was this man thinking? The serenity underlying his features were painful barbs pricking my skin as he spoke. Not only had he lifted the veil of reality’s poor imitation for me, bringing my awareness beyond the brink, but now he had the audacity to dust off his hands as if nothing had happened. He may remember his wife now, but I remember something too; I remember his face when he called me up just a few months ago, the sheer tragedy etched deeply in the lines across it. I would not allow him this coward’s way out. We were in this together, for better or worse.
“If you were married in another timeline, then you can be married in this one as well. Your love for Collette was no coincidence.” There were no coincidences in this life, I was beginning to understand— not in the traditional sense. A word I once took to mean ‘chance encounter’ or ‘random accident,’ took on another meaning entirely: two things happening at the same time, across two distinct timelines or probability fields.
“We can find her. Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
…
I led him to the Masjid Saaliheen, a twenty-minute trek by foot that we made in silence. Gene walked with the compulsory air of a captive, perhaps fighting internally between his promise to his hypnotherapist and the vows he made twelve years ago to his wife. As we made our way to the mosque, I couldn’t help but wonder if the priest who married them would declare those same vows null and void given Gene’s current circumstances.
We arrived at the place of worship. It more resembled a bodega or cell phone repair store than any sacred place of prayer.
“What is this place, Marco?”
“Hush. I’ve been in contact with this Sufi priest. I think he can help us. I saw some videos of his online, and it looks like he may have some answers about Collete’s disappearance.” Gene made a sour face but followed me all the same.
Once inside, there was no mistaking the air of veneration permeating the building. We sat down while an assistant went to fetch the Imam. After a few minutes we were invited back to the sparse prayer room, tapestries and a circle of chairs the sole furnishings.
“Hello Imam Bakri. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us,” I said. He wore a delicate, yet intricately wrapped turban around a round cap. “We were hoping you might answer some questions for us.”
I felt Gene’s breath on my shoulder as he whispered in my ear. “I’m not so sure about this, Marco. Dr. Rosin—”
“What is it you wish to know, my friend?” the Imam said.
I had debated telling Gene’s story for him, revealing his little quandary of space and time, but on the walk over I decided that the less antagonism toward the religious leader’s worldview I could espouse, the better.
“We were hoping you could tell us about the jinn.”
“Ah, yes, the jinn. I thought two nonbelievers such as yourselves would come asking about something like this. You are not Muslims?” he asked placidly.
I told him we weren’t.
“Many like you come to learn about the more fantastic elements of the Quran as opposed to our laws and traditions, but I suppose any interest is good interest,” his chest rose in a delicate sigh beneath his traditional robes. “The jinn are beneath Allah just as we are, possessing no greater power than He. In scripture, they are made from smokeless fire, so that they possess the property of invisibility. The term ‘jinn,’ can be translated literally to hidden. You may have heard of a ‘genie?’ This is the singular term for them in your popular culture.”
“You’re saying they live within our world but remain unseen by humans?” I asked.
“That’s right. Like us, they’ve been bestowed the gift of free will by Allah so they may make choices in this life to be judged in the next. Although they have the power to possess us, it is considered a sin in the eyes of God to do so.”
“I’m sorry, but Collette wasn’t possessed,” Gene interjected. The small room echoed with the power of his voice, the indignation. “What does this have to do with my wife?” He stared directly at me as he asked the question. The Imam shuffled his feet awkwardly.
“Just wait a second, will you? Imam Bakri, is it possible these jinn can travel through space and time?”
His greying eyebrows furrowed deeply in consideration, and he stroked his beard methodically. After some moments of repose, he answered. “It is possible, though never explicitly stated. There is a verse that states a jinni brings the throne of Sheba to Solomon at his behest before he can even rise from the place where he sat. We can infer from this that yes, these beings can travel quite quickly through space and time. However, as to the very nature of these abilities, the Quran remains silent.”
“You’re saying it’s possible that jinn can travel back in time, even? Imam, do you think they could alter our past or our future?”
I could feel the anger radiating from Gene beside me, though he had the grace to let the Imam ruminate on my question. Finally, Bakri gave his thoughtful response.
“It seems to me that if the jinn can traverse space-time, fetching the throne before King Solomon could even stand from his chair, then their relationship with both dimensions is far different from ours. Who’s to say that this instantaneous form of travel could not result in their movement outside of the constructs of linear time?”
“You see why I brought you here?” I said, turning to Gene.
But his face betrayed no thankfulness and no understanding.
“Be careful, friends. Do not end up as Solomon did, chasing after such illusory things. Allah punished him in the end for turning his back on Him. For making knowledge his god.”
…
“I can’t believe you brought me here!” Gene screamed at me on the sidewalk. “Telling you about Collette was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
“I’m trying to help you, man. Don’t you understand?” It was beginning to rain hard around us. “What the Imam says matches up with everything I’ve been reading. All matter exists in two states at once, until it’s observed. That’s what quantum physics tells us! And all the major religions tell us the world is not physical but some spiritual experience, intended to teach us something. It explains Collette’s disappearance and so much more! Don’t you see?”
“All I see is a lot of nonsense. I miss my wife dearly, Marco. It’s an open, festering wound. And you have the indecency to keep sticking your dirty fingers in it and twisting. I’ve had enough of these fairy tale explanations, and I’ve had enough of you! Don’t call me. Don’t drop by. Just leave me alone.” The thin remnants of his hair were plastered to his forehead, slicked straight by the drops falling down in rivulets.
“I’m not trying to hurt you. I just need to know the truth. How can you not wonder how this happened? Doesn’t a little part of you yearn to know what our universe is all about? And Collette. When you married her… wasn’t that forever? How can you leave her like this?”
His contempt deflated from his coiled shoulders, his aggrieved face becoming tranquil in one spiritual exhalation. He shouted above the rain sound. “I love my wife. But I have to learn to live in whatever reality I’m stuck in, okay? I don’t need to figure out why it happened. Isn’t knowing it happened enough? The pain of losing her is unbearable without wandering to the edges of the earth, chasing down whatever the reason is we can’t be together. I need you to respect that.”
I did respect that.
It was becoming increasingly evident that Gene was too close to the situation to become a truth-seeker. That must be why the universe handed me the problem. As Gene turned on his heels, head hunched into his shoulders like some great, bipedal turtle, I shouted after him.
“Gene! Wait!”
He turned around with the air of someone at the end of his rope.
“You said you remember what she looks like. Specific details about her family. About her life…”
…
I was fired from my job shortly after. It was just as well, since I started spending an inordinate amount of time convincing my company to start investing in quantum computing, it being the unequivocal future of our industry. I sent huge email chains to entire departments outlining how to start the process. Instead of binary coding with bits as 1 or 0, a neolithic enterprise in comparison, quantum coding would use qubits which existed in a superposition as both a 1 and a 0 until observed, quite like Schrödinger’s cat. Calculating in this way, with 64 qubits working simultaneously, we could increase our computing power exponentially.
The brass wanted nothing to do with it. What was first polite deflection later became increased workloads and biweekly performance reviews. The concepts that plagued my consciousness were weighing heavily on my being, to the point that I felt I had outgrown the reality in which my coworkers lived. When I received the news of my termination, all I could deign to feel for them was pity at their myopic worldview.
Because wasn’t it so clear? Everywhere I looked, there was mounting evidence that the nature of our lives was transient, ever shifting. Whether it be the jinn hopping about like interdimensional hobgoblins, or multiple realities stacked one on top of the other like one cosmic parfait, it was clear to me something more existed out there. I would not be a mosquito doomed to his amber grave.
Using the information Gene had remembered about Collette, I spent hours searching for where she might be in this divergent timeline. Would she have the same first name? It stood to reason she would, although my reasoning was most likely self-serving, as finding her with another name would prove near impossible. He’d given me her parents’ names too, and I tracked down every Don and Trudy I could find using phone books, social media, news articles, and whatever else I could get my hands on through surfing the web. Public databases of property records proved helpful, but there was quite a few Collette Jenkins (her maiden name) to sift through. Besides, she could’ve married again. Finding her with that name would require close to a miracle.
Would she be the same person? If I found her, what would I tell her?
She may want nothing to do with Gene. I waved away the pesky thoughts as one might a gnat. This engine had too much momentum to consider turning it around. Suddenly, I sat back from my computer, rubbing the tension from my bloodshot eyes. Through the geometric and light-filled patterns my rubbing created, I realized what I must do. If I intended to find her, I would have to let the universe cough her up to me, willingly, painlessly. Already it had shown me its deepest secrets, had laughed ironically alongside me while it produced coincidence after coincidence, a trail of fateful breadcrumbs. With all I had learned, it was a nonsensical endeavor chasing down this woman when the universe had provided everything so organically to me thus far.
The man saying ‘monkey’ in the coffee shop; running into Gene off Jackson Heights; my entire embroilment in this damned affair. These were ways the universe was leading me, and at no point was I the conductor. It was best to allow ‘coincidence,’ whatever it might mean, to rear its head, the final and solitary rule.
…
I kept myself busy researching. Major world religious texts confirmed my beliefs. I watched people pass me by in the streets now that I had lost my apartment, and I looked to them with a certain bemused air. Did they know? Could they free themselves from the shackles one day? Those that listened to my preachings called them ravings, I’m sure. When I passed by puddles I caught glimpses of my neglected visage, a reminder of what everyone else saw, another example of the surface through which they could not seem to penetrate. But I persisted. I knew these three years were a drop in time’s great ocean. My finite existence meant nothing in the face of such boundlessness.
And I never forgot about Collette.
In fact, she remained with me like a patron saint held close against the breast. She would come to me one day, and I considered it my destiny to wait for her arrival. At night, I repeated what Gene had told me about her: black, lustrous hair, set straight against her skull. Tawny eyes with flecks of molten gold when the sun hit them just so. Those silly dog socks, Don and Trudy, Gemini birthday, and love of the band Poison. Lucky for her, the shift in timelines did nothing to affect the band’s assembly or their subsequent discography. And the birthmark.
Right at the end, as the rain pattered down all around us, Gene had mentioned the birthmark that decorated just beside her navel, representing something akin to the shape of Australia. I repeated each of these things like a prayer, so as not to forget when the moment came.
It was growing cold in the city, and I had managed to acquire a sleeping bag and some ratty but substantial overcoats to keep me warm. I’m not sure what came over me, but that morning when I awoke, I knew I had to find my way to Spanish Harlem. The idea sounded in my head with the authority of a sovereign king. I rode my flagging bike down so many blocks, across the bay, past Central Park. When my reclaimed bicycle became immobilized by a broken chain worn down from rust, I walked the rest of the way, attempting to hail a cab despite my degenerate appearance. No one stopped, certain I couldn’t pay.
My internal compass led me to Teatro Hecksher, a local theatre which produced mainly children’s plays. Just now, I heard some sort of new-age jazzy rumble emanating from its depths. I slipped in, there being no ticket officer or security as the show was apparently near ending.
Sidling slyly against the wall, I attempted to avoid detection. Something told me I must be discreet, something beyond intuition. Theatregoers noticed nothing, their attention rapt by the smooth saxophone sounds carrying their attention away to ethereal places. It was a nice sound, but it was not why I was there.
I had to get behind the curtain. This much I knew.
I slinked down the aisle and up the stairs to the stage, attempting to possess the air of credibility. In that moment, the smell of my forsaken showers filled my senses, a beacon for anyone to question my presence. Confidently, I walked by performers who’d just finished or were waiting to perform. Stage handlers and lighting professionals zig-zagged around me, too occupied to care whether I belonged. Again, the mysterious magnetism drew me to the dressing rooms, nestled further down the hallway, behind the curtain.
That’s where I saw her.
She held a clipboard, and she was enumerating the schedule for the next act in the talent’s dressing room.
“Excuse me,” I whispered.
She started a bit but wrapped up with the performer and met me outside the dressing room door in the open, deserted corridor.
“Do I know you?” she said.
In the backstage dimness, I tried desperately to draw these features from my memory, to will them beside Gene at the picnic. It was a fruitless exercise. She was looking at me with an expression of curiosity and perturbation. I had come this far. I must find the truth.
“You don’t know me. But you may remember my friend, Gene. Gene Dimitriou.”
“I don’t recall anyone by that name,” she said curtly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a show to run.”
I grabbed her forearm, not violently, but with enough force to explain the severity of the situation.
“Come here,” I said, drawing her under the stray beam of light peeking through the curtain’s gap. “Stand just here.” Her look of agitation quickly turned to one of distress. I angled her under the light at just the right angle, so it might glint off her eyes.
“What do you want from me?” she said, fear gurgling to the surface.
There they were. The golden flecks in her eyes like I’d heard about from Gene. To my relief they flickered exquisitely beneath the light, the only real thing I’d seen in years. I drank in those eyes for what felt like centuries. She drew her arm away sharply. I had slackened my grip once I’d confirmed this feature.
“Dante,” she called, but not loud enough. Her fear of disrupting the performance outweighed the fear she felt for me.
“What’s your name?” I said.
She appeared to deliberate whether or not to answer, but I didn’t give her a chance. “It’s Collette, isn’t it?”
“Please leave me alone. Please. Is it money you want?”
“I have plenty of money,” I said. It was true, I hadn’t spent any of my savings. It just meant nothing to me now, just like my old job and my lost apartment. “I just want the truth.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” She attempted to shuffle by me, but I blocked her path.
“Please! Dante! Please, help me!” she screamed. From the stage I heard the horn trail off discordantly at the sound of her. “Help me!”
“I have to know the truth!” I yelled, grabbing the hem of her hoodie and yanking harshly towards the ceiling. Beneath the diffuse light, I spotted the birth mark, a near replica of the island continent half a world away.
“Stop! Let go of me!”
I smiled in a trance of vindication. Her hoodie turned to liquid in my hands, and she quickly ran off. It didn’t matter. I had found what I was looking for, the confirmation that nothing was real, that it was all one giant program. I had cracked the code. Me alone. I had found the proof.
At my back, a sound like a deathly drum brought me back to the present. A vigorous thump knocked my shoulder forward, then another struck my side just below my ribs. The burning and blinding pain followed immediately as the sticky floor rose up to meet me.
“What are you doing touching my girl like that,” a man’s voice screamed. “You were going to kill her,” he said. “He was going to kill her. You saw!”
From the ground, increasingly surrounded by my own puddled gore, I laughed with a freedom that touched my troubled bosom and lifted me up, light as a feather. It was all a dream. None of it real. I could make out the mob of people staring down at me, horrified. I laughed that much harder.
All a simulation. In another timeline, I was alive and well. In that probability field I was whole but ignorant to the nature of reality. What a shame.
In this timeline, I had sought the truth and found it, clutching it with both hands; but like smoke, it billowed between my fingers.
It wasn’t real.
The burning gashes in my side and back felt so real I could hardly stop thinking of them. They screamed at me, filling my thoughts so completely with no room for any other that they were quickly becoming the only real thing in the universe.
