I sat on the museum steps and breathed in and out like a piston. I thought about Edgar, his memory failing, his mind drifting around in time, unable to distinguish what was real and what wasn’t.
Maybe the same thing was happening to me.
Maybe this was what it felt like to go insane.
CHAPTER 4
“Your blood pressure is elevated,” Dr. Tate told me. “So’s your heart rate. But that’s not surprising. All of your other vitals are normal. As far as the scans go, I don’t see any physical abnormalities in your brain that would explain what you’re seeing. No tumors, no aneurysm. So that’s a good thing.”
“I’m just crazy,” I said.
The doctor gave me an affectionate smile. “I wouldn’t go that far, Dylan.”
She got up from the rolling chair and went to the sink in the examining room to wash her hands. When I heard the water, I twitched a little. I’d come to her clinic on Irving Park just east of the river without an appointment, but I knew that Alicia Tate would always fit me in. She’d known me since I met her son Roscoe in sixth grade. After my own mother was killed, she became a kind of surrogate mother to me. As with Edgar, I didn’t make it easy. I could appreciate everything she’d done for me now better than I did as a hostile teenager. I also appreciated that after Roscoe died in the accident, she didn’t blame me for his death.
That made one of us, because I definitely blamed myself.
I picked up the picture of Roscoe that sat on her desk. Four years later, I could still hear his voice in my head, and I missed him more than ever. The photograph didn’t show him smiling. Roscoe rarely smiled; he was serious, both as a boy and as a man. That didn’t serve him well in school, where the other kids picked on him because he was bookish, small, and black. I wasn’t much bigger myself, but Edgar had taught me to be a dirty fighter, and I beat up the largest of the bullies who taunted Roscoe. They didn’t bother him after that, and Roscoe and I became best friends. That fight was also the last time I ever felt like he needed any help from me. Instead, Roscoe was the one who became my rock through my many ups and downs.
The photograph showed him in his priest’s frock and collar. Roscoe was a straight-A genius who could have been a doctor like his mother, but he’d chosen to serve God in a South Side Catholic parish instead, where he railed against guns and gangs with every breath. I wore a tough shell around me, but my best friend—five foot four, skinny, and mostly bald, in his Goodwill sweaters and old-fashioned glasses with Coke-bottle lenses—had been a far tougher man than I’d ever be.
Alicia sat down in front of me again. She noticed the photograph in my hand. “I still talk to him, you know. It makes me feel better to do that. You can, too.”
I put the photo back on her desk. “These days, I’d be concerned that he might start talking back.”
“I really don’t think you’re crazy, Dylan.”
“Then what’s the explanation? I’m obviously having hallucinations, but they don’t feel like hallucinations. I’ve seen myself. Twice. Looking as flesh-and-blood real as you are right now. This other Dylan interacted with me. He saw me, gave me this strange stare, as if he wasn’t surprised to see me. How is that possible?”
Alicia took my hand. Her skin had an antiseptic smell. “The first time this happened was at the river, right? When you were in the midst of a horrific, stressful event that no human being should ever experience? Nearly drowning and losing the love of your life?”
I nodded.
“The second time was at the museum today? And ‘you’ were wearing a leather jacket that doesn’t exist anymore—the jacket your father was wearing when he murdered your mother? In other words, another horrific, stressful event in your life that no human being should ever experience?”
I nodded again.
Alicia looked at me as if I were a child. “Do I really need to explain this to you, Dylan?”
“Okay, it’s a mental breakdown. I get it. Of course I do. Grief, loss, stress, shock. My mind is misfiring.”
“Exactly.”
“But why a manifestation like this? Why am I seeing other versions of myself?”
“That I can’t tell you. The brain reacts to trauma in unusual ways.”
I thought about the poster of Dr. Eve Brier in the ballroom at the hotel. She was a stranger to me, but I could still picture her face in my memory with unusual clarity. “Well, there’s a speaker at the LaSalle Plaza tonight who believes that we’re living in the midst of infinite parallel universes. So I guess there must be a lot of other Dylan Morans out there. Maybe they’re paying me a visit.”
“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.”
“And you’re correct. Erwin Schrödinger used the story of the cat to explain the paradox. There’s a cat in a box with a vial of poison that may or may not be released depending on whether a single atom decays. Until an observer opens the box to check, quantum theory suggests that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Except we all know that’s absurd. Well, a Princeton scientist named Hugh Everett came up with an answer: when the box is opened, the universes split. One observer sees a cat that is alive, and in a parallel universe, another identical observer sees a cat that is dead. That’s the Many Worlds theory.”
“That sounds insane,” I said.
“Not according to the math of quantum mechanics. And the math is pretty solid. That’s why we have things like the atomic bomb.”
I shook my head. “Well, I’m not a cat in a box, so what do I do? I’ve lost everything, and now I can’t even trust my own mind.”
“Try not to obsess about it,” Alicia suggested. “I can’t really explain why this is happening to you, but I suspect the hallucinations will go away as you deal with your grief.”
I wanted to believe her, but I kept seeing my doppelgänger in the museum. His face. My face. The way he looked at me. “You know what really scared me about that other Dylan?”
“What?”
“It was what I saw in his eyes. I felt this cloud of menace from him. He was capable of anything. And he was me.”
“Dylan, he’s not you. He’s not real.”
“Is that the way I look to other people? Dangerous?”
“No. Not at all.”
“The sheriff called me a violent man,” I pointed out.
“Well, you’re not.”