Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

White Curtain ^{Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel}

I recognized him immediately although we had not seen each other for eleven years, having last met under very different circumstances. There was a change in him: he looked older, yet, somehow, better.

“Hello, Oleg,” I said.

“Hello, Dima,” he answered, as if we had spent the day before as we used to, in years past, drinking and arguing about the cascading splice theory. “I knew you’d come. Sit. No, not on this chair, that’s for visitors. Sit here, on the sofa.”

I sat down, and the sofa squeaked in protest.

“Of course you knew,” I said. “You are the prophet.”

“I’m no prophet,” he said sadly. “Who knows that better than you?” He spoke more slowly than ever before, enunciating each word to the last syllable.

“Yes,” I said, not trying to hide the sarcasm. “Who better?”

“How did you find me?” Oleg asked.

“With difficulty,” I admitted. “But I found you. You were…”

“No matter,” he interrupted, “it does not matter at all, what I used to be. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you come? I don’t think you came just to make sure it’s me. You want something from me. Everyone does. Success? Luck?”

If there was irony in his voice, I did not notice it. I did not need luck. Especially not from him.

“Irina died last year,” I said, looking in his eyes. “We had been together for ten years, two months, and sixteen days.”

He turned away from me to look at the curtained window. What did he see in that blank screen, that white expanse where all the colors of his life were mixed together? Himself, young, walking Irina to a discotheque? Or only Irina, on that long-ago day when yet another dazzling presentation he made at that morning’s seminar inspired him to believe himself irresistible to women? The day I watched, from the auditorium door, as he proposed to her with this newfound confidence, as she kissed the corner of his mouth and said that he was a little late because she loved another, and cast an eloquent glance in my direction, and he followed it and understood. The day Irina and I left him behind, defeated and deflated, useless even to himself.

The day I saw him for the last time, until now. On the following morning Oleg Larionov, previously a promising theoretical physicist, submitted his letter of resignation. The dean, though loath to lose him, eventually would have allowed him to leave on good terms (he stamped the letter with “Approved at the end of semester”), but Oleg left without waiting for the response. He left without saying goodbye to anyone. He had been seen boarding the forty-three bus in the direction of the train station; except for that, no one had even an inkling of where he was going.

And that was all.

“Why did she die?” Oleg asked, his gaze still on the white, screenlike curtain. Why did you not save her? was what I heard.

I could not. I could do nothing. My strength was in theoretical work, I excelled at splice calculations, perhaps not all, but up to a very high complexity, up to twelve branches of reality, that’s quite a lot, almost unheard-of for an analytical solution—but in reality there was nothing I could do. Irina fell ill unexpectedly and died soon after. How soon? She was diagnosed in March, and in July she was gone.

“Brain tumor,” I said. “Could not have been predicted. There wasn’t a nexus of branching…”

“Theoretically,” he interrupted, and I could not decide if his words mocked mine, or were a simple statement of fact.

“I’ve been looking for you for an entire year,” I said. “And found you. As you can see. Do you remember Gennady Bortman?”

Oleg turned toward me at last. I had expected something in his gaze, a feeling, anything. But there was nothing. He looked at me as calmly as a doctor at a patient suffering from a cold.

“I do remember him,” said Oleg. “It’s a pity.”

“He stayed on the branch,” I said, “which you predicted for him. Was there anything he could have done?”

So much depended on Oleg’s answer. I did not want to think about my life. But Ira’s….

“Dima,” said Oleg and rubbed his hands together, an old familiar gesture with which he once rubbed chalk dust off his hands after a long presentation, adding it to the floor already littered with chalk crumbs. “Dima, he could have chosen any branch in his reality. The months he had until…. Of hundreds of decisions, you understand, each time a new branch grew, but always in the direction…”

“In our reality,” I interrupted, “only your prophesy could come true. Your branch was stronger, more resilient.”

“Yes,” Oleg nodded, “My branch had higher probability, a million times higher.”

“In other words,” I said, and it was important for me to be clear, so very important that I had searched for Oleg for a year, an excruciating year of living on memories, “in other words, for a million possibilities you choose, there may be one chance for someone else’s choice?”

“Maybe not a million,” he said, still rubbing his fingers, his gesture irritating me so much that I fought the urge to slap his hands. “Maybe ten million. Maybe a hundred billion. There is no way to measure, no statistics.”

“You’ve had years to compile statistics,” I said. “You set yourself up as a prophet to compile statistics, don’t try to tell me you didn’t! For God’s sake, don’t tell me you are disillusioned with pure science and became a practicing prophet only to help people!”

“I do help them…”

“Some of them! Oleg, I’ve hung around here for a week; I listen to people waiting for their turn, some for six months, they come every day, they wait and walk away and come back, and once in a while one of your secretaries will come out and say, “He won’t see you, sorry,” and it’s no use arguing back. And some, people you pick out from the crowd, you’ll see them right away, only them, predict a happy, creative life with luck in business and personal fulfillment.”

“Have I been wrong?”

“Never! You are one hundred percent reliable! This means you choose the necessary branch of the multiverse with an accuracy of at least ten sigmas!”

“Eight sigmas,” he corrected. “I have compiled enough records for eight sigmas, I need another three years…”

“The hell with that,” I said. “I looked for you so that…”

“It is impossible, Dima.” Oleg stopped rubbing nonexistent chalk off his fingers, put his hands on his knees, and looked me in the eyes. “You know it’s impossible. You were the one who proved the theorem, according to which…”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I proved it. If in Branch N of the multiverse the world-line of object A is a segment of length L, this line cannot be extended within its branch by grafting it to other realities.”

“You proved it. And what do you want from me now, Dima? Ira does not exist in this here-and-now. You could not keep her.”

“I could not…”

“You could not hold on to her,” Oleg repeated. “And what is it to us that our Irisha…”

He said “our.” He still lived with the feeling that she had only temporarily left him for another and would come back.

“…our Irisha is still alive in a billion other branches of the multiverse?”

“You could,” I said. “You are a genius at splicing. You can tie branches together and graft them, like Michurin grafted an apple branch to a pear tree.”

“And how did it end?” Oleg chuckled. “Michurin. Burbank. Lysenko.”

“Won’t you even try!” I yelled.

Oleg stood up and walked toward the window as if to put as much distance between us as possible, as if my presence made it hard for him to breathe, to think, to live.

“I tried. All the time, I tried,” he said, his voice as hollow as if he spoke under water.

“You….” I mumbled in confusion. He could not have known about Ira.

“I can do nothing for myself, you see? Think, Dima, you are one hell of a theoretician. If I am in Branch N, then all possible splices that can change my fate…”

“Are bound by the causality of that branch—yes, I proved that in my third year of study,” I said. “But you said that you tried….”

“I couldn’t avoid trying. What if the theory were wrong?”

We sat in silence, each thinking about what had been said.

“How did you know about Ira?”

Oleg turned and looked at me with a silent accusation.

“Well, Dima, if you found me…. You didn’t have to look for me, I checked the university web page every day, I knew about everything that went on. I could not stand not knowing.”

“That never entered my mind,” I muttered. “I would have figured out where you were long ago.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “I took measures. When Ira died, the alumni association ran an obituary the same day. I tried, right there and then. God, Dima, I leaped from branch to branch like a neurotic monkey, spliced more realities than I had ever allowed myself before—and, after that, never again.

“I didn’t…”

“Of course you didn’t feel a thing!”

“Sorry,” I said. “I am not myself today. Stupid; I should have known, I could not feel a break, my reality was contiguous with my past.”

“You had hundreds of realities, and in all of them Ira died, and I was always late, I made it to the funeral in one hundred seventy-six branches.”

“You went to a hundred seventy-six funerals?” I said, horrified.

He didn’t say anything, and I understood why he looked so old to me. I would have gone mad in his place.

“Then,” I said, “there was nothing…”

“You are the one who proved that theorem,” said Oleg roughly, “and I never found experimental evidence to the contrary.”

“So that’s how it is,” I muttered. Something hit me all at once, a year’s worth of fatigue, perhaps, and maybe now I made decisions one after another, each taking me to a different branch, each branch beginning with: “So that’s how it is” parroted over and over.

“Well, that is all,” said Oleg and stood up abruptly. He reached to shake my hand; his fingers were, for some strange reason, dusted with chalk. “Enough already with the histrionics. You lived by hope alone for a year, looking for me, and I lost hope a year ago and had the time I needed to come to terms with it. I can do nothing for you, Dima. Not—a—thing.”

I stood up.

“Leaving?” Oleg asked, his voice flat, without giving me his hand. “You looked for me for such a long time. We could have coffee, dinner, you could tell me about the university. Did Kulikov defend his dissertation?”

“You’ve been on their web site.” I shrugged.

“No, not since….”

“You,” I said, from the doorway, “you splice realities to make lives better.”

“Of course,” he nodded.

“And those you turn away?”

“So that’s the question.” He came closer and with a long-familiar gesture put both his hands on my shoulders. His palms were unpleasantly heavy, and I sagged like Atlas under the weight of the sky.

“You think I turn away those whose fate I cannot channel in a better direction,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. He did not even blink, and I tried not to blink as well. “You are mistaken, Dima. I have rules. Well, not quite rules; I want nothing to do with unpleasant people, or with people whose happiness depends on the suffering of others. I choose, yes. Do you think I have no right?”

“Oh, come on,” I muttered. “It’s just that…”

“You thought of what I could have done for you?”

“No.” I chuckled. “You would not do this, and it’s not what I would want.”

“You do want,” he said roughly. “Don’t lie, your eyes betray you. You want to be happy, everyone does. You want her specter to stop haunting you. You want to forget…”

“No!”

“Fine; to remember, just about enough to light a candle, that is sufficient. And live a happy life. You came to have your life spliced with a branch in which you are happy and prosperous…”

“No,” I said, but blinked and lowered my eyes. I wanted that. So what? This he could do, I knew. I also knew he would not lift a finger to help me.

“Yes,” he sighed and pressed even harder (or did I imagine it?) on my shoulders. “You know, Dima, when you came in and we recognized each other, the first thing I did was run through a list of splices, in my head, that I could have made. For you. Even if you had not asked me, I decided to do it. Because to live without Ira…. I know how it was for me, but I cannot do anything for myself because of your damned theorem. But I could help you, yes, or else what purpose do I have?”

He took his hands from my shoulders at last, and I stood straight, feeling suddenly light. Was it the lifting of that weight that made me feel relieved, or thinking, for a moment: Oleg can, Oleg will?

“There isn’t a single line in all of the multiverse,” he said, “where all is well for you. Not one. What can I do with that?”

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed and stepped back from him. “You know that’s nonsense, why do you even…. We discussed this problem since…”

“Yes, we discussed,” he interrupted.

“The multiverse is infinite!” I exclaimed. “There is an infinite number of branches of reality, and all without exception can be embodied as our reality, any version of any event, phenomenon, process, and that means…”

“That means,” said Oleg regretfully, “that you were right, not I. You proved there’s only a finite number of branches because the wave function for each event has a limited number of solutions.”

“Yes, but since then…”

“But I,” Oleg raised his voice, “I maintained that there is an infinity of branches, and in the multiverse’s infinity there must exist all possibilities of human fate—happy and unhappy. I was sure! But now I know I was wrong. The branching of destinies is limited, Dima. Forgive me. I wanted. Very much. At least in Ira’s memory. It’s no use. There is a huge number of versions of your life, but none where you are happy.”

“Well, then,” I said, feeling an emptiness in my soul which I now knew could never be filled, “we’ve resolved an old scientific debate. For once you have admitted that I’m right.”

“The branching is finite,” he said. “Aren’t you happy to be right?”

Did he intentionally torment me?

“Farewell,” I said and closed the door quietly behind me. Three of the prophet’s secretaries sat at their computers, not even lifting their eyes to me.

“The office hours are over for today,” a ceiling speaker screeched, and dozens of people crowded into the waiting room sighed as one with disappointment.

It was windy outside, and a drizzle soaked my hair. The rented car was parked two blocks away, and by the time I sat behind the wheel my shirt was plastered to my body, and thoughts had deserted me entirely, all thoughts but one: Who needs a life like this?

I drove slowly in the right lane without knowing where I was, in what part of the city, until I saw a Dead End sign. I turned toward the curb and killed the engine.

We had debated once, with Oleg. Not just us; it was a popular question, fifteen years ago, in theoretic everettics: Is there a limited number of events in the world of continuous branchings? I said yes, it is limited, and my arguments…. God, I had no idea I could win the debate and lose my own life!

Rain. It will always be raining now.

The phone rang, its ringtone a Hungarian dance by Brahms. I fumbled in my bag and brought the phone to my ear.

“Dima!”

I did not recognize the voice at first: it was Mikhail Natanovich, the doctor who treated, but could not save, Irina. “Dima, I’ve been calling you all day!”

“My phone was off,” I said.

“No matter! I wanted to tell you: today’s test results are much better than before. Much better! This new drug, it’s really…. Dima, I think it will all turn out for the best, now. Do you hear me, Dima?”

Will turn out for the best. New drug. Ira.

“How is she?” I asked, squeezing the phone as if I wanted to break it.

“Slept well all night.”

“Ira?”

“Irina Yakovlevna had breakfast this morning, for the first time….”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for calling. I will be at the hospital no later than nine this evening, as soon as I can get there.”

I dropped the phone on the seat next to me.

Oleg succeeded? How? He said himself—not quite an hour ago—that there’s a limited number of splices, that if she died, then….

Was he mistaken? Or did he accomplish that which he himself considered impossible? Or found an infinity of branches and among them, one in which everything, simply everything, works out?

I lifted the receiver and dialed his number. It was my duty to thank him, at least.

“I need to speak with Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said when one of his secretaries answered.

“Unfortunately…”

“This is Mantsev, his old friend and colleague. I was just with him and want to…”

“Unfortunately,” repeated a voice as gray as the rain beyond my window, “it’s impossible. Oleg Nikolaevich passed away immediately after you left.”

How could that happen? He had appeared healthy and acted perfectly well when….

“I do not understand,” I muttered. “How is this…”

“The police are here now,” the secretary said. “I think they might want to speak with you. You were his last visitor of the day. Ten minutes after you left…”

“Out with it!”

“Oleg Nikolaevich threw himself out the window. And we are…”

“On the sixth floor,” I finished for him.

This is how it ends, I thought. He pushed the white curtain out of the way and stepped through.

Rain ended. I drove to the airport as fast as I could go. At nine I had to be at the hospital. With Irina. My Irina.

I was right after all: there is a limit to the number of splices. Oleg proved it, conclusively this time. He said he could do nothing with his fate. Of course. Except for one thing: he could interrupt it. Only then could my fate where Ira died be spliced with the branch where she survived.

You can extend one branch by cutting off another. The law of conservation. Oleg knew.

Why did he do this? He had every reason to hate me. What would I have done in his place, knowing there was only one possibility? What am I? A theoretician. Oleg worked in practical, experimental everettics. He did what I could only guess at. Or calculate.

I sped up, no longer watching the speedometer.

I knew that Irina and I—that all will be well.

How can I live, knowing that?