Parallelities (22 page)

“You mean he’s sensible, and seems sane,” Max supplied quietly.

His double nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it exactly. Anyway, it’s clear right away that he has plenty of money, but in spite of appearances I’m still not sure about the sense part.
He takes me downstairs, and the place is fitted out like a new ride at Universal Studios. He tells me that I’m real lucky, because I’m going to be present for this room-sized gadget’s first full run-through. So while he’s busy lighting the place up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, I decide to take a little stroll and check everything out. And like a fool, I find myself stepping under this flickering arch.” He smiled wanly, a smile Max knew all too well.

“The result is that I end up being the guinea pig for the guy’s initial tryout.” He laughed hollowly. “I mean, can you imagine anybody being that stupid?”

“Actually, I can.” Max looked away.

“Yeah, well, you must know dumber people than me. Anyway, I don’t really feel a thing, but it turns out that I come out of this crazy contraption well and truly zapped, you know? But I don’t know anything’s wrong until I’m asleep.”

“What happens then?” Max prompted him.

His counterpart hesitated, but having decided to tell all, could hardly find a decent excuse not to continue. “It’s hard to describe. I think what’s happening is that in my dreams I keep seeing myself slipping between these paras he alluded to. Each dream takes me to a different one, and I’m telling you, they’re so goddamn real you can practically smell them.” He leaned back and crossed his arms, gazing out at the placid Pacific.

“But I know they’re not real, that they’re only dreams.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice significantly. “Want to know how I know?”

“I’d be very interested,” Max assured him dryly.

The other Max stared unblinkingly into his visitor’s eyes. “Because they’re too fantastic. Dream worlds come out of and are based on our own personal realities. They’re not like the inventions of some crackpot novelist out to sell fragments of his imagination for a few bucks. And these dream paras, well, even the least of them is just too extreme to be believed.” He sat back in his chair.

“Now, if they made some sense, bore any relation to the real world, I might really be worried. But as it is, I think they’re pretty harmless. They just ruin my sleep. What I’m thinking, and the reason I called your paper, is that the vividness of them might be worth sharing.” He winked. “You know what I mean?”

“Why don’t you write about them yourself?” Max inquired apathetically. “Don’t you work for a weekly tabloid newspaper?”

“Got some background on me, did you?” The other Max grinned. “That’s para for the course.” His expression twisted. “Sorry. Bad joke. But I thought you’d understand. I have this strange feeling we share a lot in common besides looks.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d have to agree with that.”

“I work for the
National Enquirer.”
The other Max stated it proudly, as though it was significant of something.

Max looked dubious. “Never heard of it.”

His other self frowned. “Come on, man. Don’t put me on. The
Enquirer
has the largest circulation of any tabloid in the country.”

“I’m telling you the truth.” The tiny green light that indicated the status of the batteries in Max’s recorder had gone to red, but he did not bother to stop and change them. This interview was not going anywhere anyhow. Even if it was, he could fake whatever else his counterpart might choose to say.

Everything the local Max had said about Barrington and parallelities and the effects of the Boles Field rang true—but what was this
Enquirer
nonsense?

Before he could think of a follow-up query that would not make him sound like a complete lunatic, the other Max was shaking a knowing finger at him. “I get it. You’re testing me.”

“Testing you?” The bewilderment in Max’s voice was genuine.

“Sure. To see if I’m crazy.” He grinned understandingly. “Hey, if I was in your position, I’d do the same thing. But I think you could have come up with something a little more subtle. Imagine another tabloid reporter claiming never having heard of the
Enquirer!
Stick to that line and you’ll have me wondering if you’re the crazy one.”

Enquirer, Enquirer.
Could there be a large but highly localized scandal sheet by that name somewhere back East, or maybe overseas? Max racked his memory and drew only blanks. Since he knew he was not insane, the only conclusion he could come to was that the publication in question had to be a para tabloid paper in this parallel world.

Careful now
, he warned himself.
Tread cautiously or you’re liable to lose your perspective here. This guy is the para Max,
you’re the genuine one. The first Max, the Max prime. Focus on that and whatever happens, don’t lose sight of it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told his double finally.

“I thought it wouldn’t.” The other Max chuckled. “‘Never heard of the
National Enquirer.’
Yeah, sure. Anyway, you see why I can’t write this up myself. Can’t file a report on my own dreams. We’re supposed to go
outside
for our stories. No way my editor would buy anything so personal. But you could do it, and we can both make a couple of bucks.” Content with this explanation, he waited for a response. When none was forthcoming from his dull-visaged visitor, he tried to encourage him.

“How about it? I know it’s a wild story, even for your typical tabloid dream yarn, but we can polish it to the point where it’s acceptable. Hell, I can even do the rough draft for you. Or you can listen to me ramble and do your own thing from the transcription. None of your readers need to know what I do for a living.” He continued enthusiastically.

“I’m telling you, when you hear about some of the places I’ve been in my sleep lately you’ll be glad you don’t have the same kind of dreams. It’s been pretty damn unsettling. I figure getting it out, telling it to somebody else, could be good therapy for me. Because I’ll tell you, sometimes they feel so authentic, sometimes I’m so
right there
, that I wake up in a cold sweat from the reality of it.” He took a long swig of his beer.

“You want to know what the most unsettling thing about them is?”

“No, what’s the most unsettling thing about them?”
I’m
the real one
, Max kept assuring himself, over and over.
I’m the original.
Not this joker, with his virtual dreams and imaginary newspaper.

His counterpart’s voice softened. “The way they linger in the memory. By the time I’ve been up a few hours the following morning, I usually have trouble remembering the details of a dream. Not with these. They stick around like they’ve been epoxied to my brain. I can tell you details of the dream I had
last week.
For me, that’s unreal.” A sudden concern made him twitch slightly.

“Hey, you don’t think there really is a nut named Boles running around town with some kind of generator or ray that makes people have violent, unforgettable dreams, do you?”

“Ordinarily, I’d say not a chance.” Max pushed back his chair and rose from the table. “I don’t think you have to worry about anything like that. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee it. What you’re describing doesn’t sound like the kind of apparatus that would be very portable. For one thing, it’d have to be permanently locked down somewhere so it could draw on a continuous source of power.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” The double nodded admiringly. “You’re a bright guy, Max. Not to mention good-looking.” He grinned. “How come you’re still working for a second-rate rag like the
Investigator?”

“It suits me” was all Max could think of to say to his double. “I have to go now.”

The other Max looked distressed. “But we’re just getting started. I think we could establish a real good working relationship here.” As Max headed for the door his anxious counterpart followed, persistent and maybe a little hurt. “What about my dreams?”

“I told you—write them up yourself.”

“And I told you why I can’t do that.” His double was clearly baffled. Everything had been going so well. Almost from the start he had felt that his visitor understood him better than any other journalist he had ever met, even those he had worked with for months at a time on the
Enquirer.

Max was anxious to be out of there, to get away from the apartment that looked, felt, and smelled like his, but was not. His impatience was reflected in his reply. “Then find somebody else to write your story. I can’t do it.” Like the doorknob at the bottom of the rabbit hole in
Alice
, the one attached to his front door seemed to be willfully resisting his efforts to turn it.

His bewildered counterpart pleaded with him. “Don’t run out on me like this, Max. I mean, I know we just met, but dammit, I feel like I know you already.”

Just as Max was about to scream, the stubborn door finally yielded. Turning, he favored his other self with a look of such anguish that his double flinched.

“You don’t want to know me. At this point, I’m not sure that I want to know me.” A lopsided grin cracked his face.
“It’s not necessary anyway. Everybody else you know here knows me already.”

With that he exited quickly, deliberately pulling the door shut behind him and leaving his other self standing alone in their apartment, mystified and more than a little wounded.

Instinctively, he stumbled down the hallway, heading for the elevator because there was nowhere else to go. The elevator could take him to the garage, or to the other floors, but neither it nor anything else under his control could carry him home. Home. But wasn’t he already home? Wasn’t this his building, his address, his Santa Monica?

It was, and it was not. This apartment, like this world, belonged not to him but to his other. His para other. Unless, of course, the Max Parker he had just left behind was the real Max Parker, the first Max Parker, Maxwell Parker fundamental, and he himself was nothing more than a figment of the other Parker’s dreaming. Even now, the other Parker might actually be lying asleep in his bed, dreaming that he had just been awake talking to a duplicate of himself about turning his strange dreams of parallel worlds into a series of stories for a competing tabloid. Soon, tomorrow, this evening, he was liable to wake up, startled awake by the depth and color and richness of still another in an endless succession of dreams of infinite parallelities.

In which case he, the Max Parker staggering down the hall even now, would cease to exist except as a memory in the mind of his newly awakened self.

Tripping on the same loose piece of carpet he and his neighbors on the top floor had been besieging the landlord to fix for the past several months, he stumbled sideways. His left leg banged into the wall and pain shot through his knee. Wincing, he halted and grabbed the injured joint. If he was nothing more than a dream, and a dreaming parallelity at that, then the sleeping Max Parker was capable of more detailed and vivid reveries than Max had ever imagined.

I am not a dream
, he told himself angrily. Straightening, he worked his fingers up his body. There was nothing dreamlike about the throbbing pain in his knee, or the mushy feel of his underexercised belly, or his damp mouth and sensitive eyes. No, goddamn it! If anyone was a dream it was the Max he had just finished speaking with. A para Max. Just like this was a para world.

I’m the real one
, he reassured himself furiously.
All these worlds, all these paras, revolve around
me.

In the garage, he passed a young couple he recognized but did not know. They lived in the building, and might easily have been residents of the same floor, but, man and woman both, they looked like him. As he made his way back to the Aurora, his Aurora, a late-model Lincoln drove in and parked. A well-groomed older man emerged who might have been Walter Konigsberg, the retired engineer who lived on the second floor. Might have been, except that he looked like a well-weathered, time-aged, slightly Teutonic version of Max Parker.

The first thing Max did upon sliding behind the wheel of
his comfortable, familiar automobile was to lock all the doors. It was as if he could seal out the madness that had engulfed him simply by keeping the clear power windows closed against the outside.

Sitting motionless in the car allowed him to gather his thoughts as well as his wind, but it was far from satisfying. Without a clear notion of where he was going or what he was going to do when he got there, he started the engine and backed out of his assigned parking space. Better to be doing something, anything, he thought, than meditating morosely while waiting for the cosmos to rescue him from the onrushing approach of insanity.

How many paras were there? An infinite number for every individual? Or was the incomprehensible, too, ruled by strictures and laws he could not imagine? In addition to the paras where aliens commuted to Earth and the minions of Cthulhu ruled and civilization had been devastated or utopianized or just ever so slightly bent, besides the paras where ghosts and para ghosts and para alien ghosts walked the Earth and where the most perfect mate for himself was himself, was there one like this one for every man, woman, and child? A para existing for and inhabited solely and entirely by themselves? It nearly beggared the question of how many inconceivable paras existed that he had not yet visited.

Imagine if you will for a moment
, he instructed himself,
a reality inhabited entirely by paras of Barry Manilow.
For the first time all that day, or all that para day, he managed a smile. Not
a para smile, but one that could lay claim to reality. Feeling a little better, he thumbed the built-in garage-door opener and pulled out onto the steep side street that intersected Ocean Avenue. On the way up, he waved to a derelict resting in a bed he had fashioned from the flower bushes across the street. Looking back at him, the homeless man responded with a cheerful if none too steady wave. Para or not, the expression on the dirty, battered face was honest.

More honest than the physics of my life
, Max reflected.
There’s a whole lotta cheatin’ goin’ on there. Give me a para smile over a real glare any day.