Multiversum (24 page)

Alex hunted around for the antenna cable. He found it sticking out of the living-room wall, next to the mini-fridge, and hooked it up to the back of the TV set. Then he got the remote control out of a compartment on the side of the set and handed it to Marco.

‘It's no use,' Alex commented as his friend flicked through the channels, finding nothing on each one but a blue background with the same phrase:

We apologise for this interruption in service
Our broadcast will resume as soon as possible

‘There are people who know, but they'll never tell us what's really happening,' Marco said, holding in his rage. His hands trembled as he let out a sarcastic sneer while staring at the wall in front of him. Then he picked up the remote control and flung it against the wall, shattering it into several pieces. ‘You bastards!'

‘Becker told you, didn't he?'

Marco turned to look at his friend. He manually steered the wheelchair straight ahead and braked when he was only a few centimetres away from Alex. ‘That's right. The end is near. You have to get back to Jenny. The two of you might just have a chance.'

‘But how am I supposed to find this Memoria? I have no idea what it is or where it is. And what does it have to do with everything that's going on?'

‘That's something we're going to have to find out,' Marco replied, before tilting his head towards the living-room window. ‘Even if it's the last thing I do before dying along with all the rest of these people.'

Alex shook his head, but he didn't know what to say. He hugged Marco, holding him tight for a few seconds. With his eyes closed, he tried to imagine what might be the cause of the global panic, but he came up with nothing.

Thanks, my friend
, he thought, but he didn't have the strength to say it out loud.

The silence that accompanied those moments of sadness and resignation was charged with significance. There was no need to say anything more. Marco broke away from the hug and wiped the tears that had started to well up in his eyes, and that was when Alex saw inside him.

The memory hit him violently, practically nailing him to the ground in the face of those events, unable to resist the power of the images in any way.

He saw the Jeep being driven by Marco's father lurch out of control on one of the mountain's hairpin bends before hitting the guardrail, crashing through it, and hurtling out into the void, while the blizzard raged, covering the roads, trees, and rocks in a blanket of snow. He saw all this through the eyes of his best friend, trapped in the back seat while just a few centimetres away from him two human lives were about to be snuffed out. The two most important people in the world to him. The two people who had always been by his side. The overwhelming feeling of emptiness as the Jeep plunged into the ravine gave Alex a sense of vertigo. His legs started trembling and his body was wracked with shivers. It was like being there, in the back seat of that Jeep. It was like witnessing the end.

A stupid, banal sound — yet at the same time unexpected and sinister — broke the spell of Marco's memory as it began to take hold of Alex's mental vision.

It was the sound of the intercom, just a short distance from the two of them. They exchanged a brief, stunned glance, as if Marco had felt the same disorientation that Alex had while he was delving involuntarily into his friend's memory.

Marco reached out a hand towards the intercom.

‘Yes?' he said, worried. Then he waited a few seconds and turned to Alex. ‘It's your father.'

29

Giorgio Loria strode through the front door. ‘I knew I'd find you here.'

His father's tone of voice was truly surprising. There wasn't a hint of accusation. Nor was he threatening. He was almost more compassionate than angry. Alex took a step back without thinking, as if afraid that this strange demeanour of his father's concealed intentions that were much worse.

‘I … had to help Marco and …'

‘Yes, but now you need to come with me. This is important. Later we'll call someone to look after your friend.'

‘Yes, but …'

‘Come on.'

Giorgio grabbed Alex's arm and dragged him out of the apartment. Neither of them said a word during the short walk home. They did nothing more than exchange a look of worry as they walked past the gridlock of cars, some of which were dented, at the intersection of Viale Gran Sasso and Piazza Piola.

When they walked into the apartment, they found Valeria sitting on the sofa, her eyes glistening, her face in her hands, and her elbows propped on her legs.

‘You found him …' As she spoke, her eyes came alive again for a moment.

‘Yeah. Alex, sit down. Please.'

Alex complied: he went over to the armchair opposite the sofa and took a seat. Giorgio sat next to Valeria, across from the large cardboard box with
Picture Frames
written on all its sides.

‘We know why you pulled off your little escapade. Now listen carefully to what we have to say. What I'm about to tell you is probably locked somewhere in the depths of your subconscious. It's possible that memories that you had buried deep will emerge.'

Alex didn't have the slightest idea what his father was talking about. But he could see the anguish on both his father's and his mother's faces. ‘What do you mean?'

Giorgio stared at him. ‘You don't remember anything about being five … or say six years old … do you?'

Alex shook his head and grimaced, as if to say ‘not much, anyway'.

‘You see, when you were very small,' Valeria broke in, ‘you came down with a terrible illness. It's quite likely that you have no memories of that period, and of whatever it was that was troubling you. Let's just say that these unfortunate episodes have been …'

‘… forgotten, or buried,' concluded Giorgio.

‘What are you saying?'

‘Well, you see,' his mother continued, ‘you were sick, very sick. You had a terrible depression, along with episodes of schizophrenia and psychosis.'

‘Are you kidding?' Alex said, frowning and leaning forward.

‘No, not at all,' Giorgio replied. Then he pulled a pair of scissors out of the drawer in the cabinet next to the sofa. ‘We were sure that certain things would never happen again. We hoped for that with all our hearts … until today.'

‘Why? What happened today?'

‘I heard you, when you were in the bathroom. You said her name.'

Alex froze, baffled.

‘It was an obsession you had,' Valeria went on. ‘Some kind of imaginary friend. You used to write her name everywhere, you wouldn't talk about anything but her. Usually, children experience this sort of thing as a game. But for you it was a genuine, full-blown obsession.'

Alex was distraught at this revelation. They were talking about Jenny. ‘My imaginary friend …' he whispered under his breath.

‘You insisted that she talked to you all the time. Once you even defaced the whole apartment with a red magic marker, writing Jenny's name on the walls and drawing a strange symbol over and over again.'

Alex shivered. His mother was talking about the triskelion. The amulet that Jenny had with her at all times.

Giorgio cut through several lengths of sticky tape and opened the box. He reached in and started pulling out folders, drawings, photographs, and a journal. The journal that Valeria kept on her son's sickness.

‘See for yourself,' Giorgio said, handing Alex a stack of drawings. ‘This is what was going through your head back then.'

He took them, laid them in his lap, and started to look through them.

A pier. A beach.

A woman with red hair looking into a telescope.

An underground tunnel filled with corpses.

A series of scenes of death and destruction, blood and suffering.

That's impossible
, thought Alex, petrified at the sight of those images. A shiver ran down his spine. His whole body suddenly stiffened.

He was speechless. Some of the drawings depicted all the things he'd encountered over the past few days. There was the beach at Altona and the pier where he had made a date to meet Jenny. There was Mary Thompson, the nanny-astrologer, with her trusty telescope.

And there was the tunnel with the corpses that he'd run through in the parallel reality where Milan was the scene of a bloody uprising.

All this was already in his brain, years before it happened. How could that be?

I've already been to these places … I've seen it all before
, he thought to himself.

‘I used to talk to Jenny …' said Alex as his mother leafed through her journal.

‘Darling, we're afraid it's starting to happen to you again.' Valeria's voice was dull, almost resigned. ‘We don't want that.'

‘I was already talking to Jenny! Damn it, I was communicating with her!'

Valeria turned to her husband. ‘Oh my God, it's happening again … He thinks she's real.'

‘Mamma, Jenny
is
real! She's real all right!' shouted Alex, waving the drawings that he was holding in one hand.

The same words he used to say when he was a child, with that same icy look in his eyes
, his father mused. ‘Do you realise what you're saying?'

‘You'll never believe me. Something's happening that goes beyond your wildest imagination, so I know that what I'm going to tell you will sound absurd, crazy. But look around you. Isn't it crazy that the internet has broken down? Isn't it crazy that neither TVs nor mobile phones work anymore?'

Valeria turned and gave Giorgio a worried look.

‘What does that have to do with Jenny?' he snapped. ‘The neurologist told me that …'

Alex raised an eyebrow. ‘The neurologist?'

‘The doctor who was in charge of your case, when you were little.'

‘What the fuck did you do to me when I was six years old? How could you have uprooted Jenny from my mind for so many years?' demanded Alex, leaping to his feet in indignation.

‘Alex …' Valeria began, ‘you were taking pills for months and months. But the situation only got worse. Every night you'd wake up from terrible nightmares. You talked about catastrophic things happening. You described cities in flames, and you told us that you kept seeing the Earth reduced to a wasteland of smoking embers …'

‘The drug therapy hadn't worked,' Giorgio went on, ‘so your psychiatrist sent us to see a colleague of hers, a neurologist, Dr Siniscalco. He treated your problem, in a much more effective method … and he cured you.'

‘How?'

‘With electroconvulsive therapy.'

Alex furrowed his brow and felt his hands start to shake. ‘Are you saying that …?'

His father looked him right in the eye. He couldn't hide the truth from him any longer.

‘Shock therapy.'

Alex was speechless for several seconds. His gaze fell on the drawings sticking out of the box. There were lots of them. They were terribly dark. Appalling visions of things to come, filled with suffering and pain. ‘You're joking, aren't you?'

‘A
few
sessions of shock therapy. It had to be done. Afterwards, it was like you were reborn. You never talked about Jenny again, you went back to being a sunny little boy, you started playing with your friends again …'

‘I don't believe it! You can't be serious … I, I had a gift, I —'

‘What gift?' Valeria broke in. ‘You were suffering from a very serious case of depression and episodes of schizophrenia. We thought the situation was hopeless, but instead …'

‘You don't know what you've done!' Alex stood up, went over to the box, and started rummaging inside it.

Valeria and Giorgio didn't know how to respond to their son's accusations.
Perhaps
, they thought,
it's the sickness that's making him talk like that
.

‘I have to go,' he exclaimed, as he grabbed the box and started to pick it up.

‘Alex, stop right there!'

Giorgio leaped to his feet, his eyes puffy and filled with despair, his hands stretched out like claws, his swollen veins like ropes on his reddened flesh.

‘Don't touch me! You're not my parents. Not anymore.'

‘Please, Alex!' Valeria shouted from the sofa, her hands in her hair, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Giorgio reached out a hand to his son, trying to hold on to him, to stop him from leaving. They exchanged a glance full of rage and anguish, then Giorgio froze.

And Alex saw.

He saw the white gurney.

He saw his wrists and ankles strapped to the rail on the side of the gurney.

He saw a broad white gauze strip stuck to his mouth.

He saw white lab coats and fluorescent lights.