The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

An hour later, when the doorbell rang, they didn’t jump but rather looked around like men startled from a dream. Wesley went downstairs and paid the delivery guy, who had arrived with a loaded pizza from Harry’s and a six-pack of Pepsi. They ate at the kitchen table, bent over the Kindle. Wesley put away three slices himself, a personal best, with no awareness of what he was eating.

They didn’t use up the eight hundred downloads they had ordered – nowhere near it – but in the next four hours they skimmed enough stories from various Urs to make their heads ache. Wesley felt as though his mind were aching. From the nearly identical looks he saw on the faces of the other two – pale cheeks, avid eyes in bruised sockets, crazed hair – he guessed he wasn’t alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most were similar, not one was exactly the same.

The inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new president. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a senator none of them had heard of: Linwood Speck of New Jersey.

‘He always says no to the vice-presidency when someone else wins the top spot,’ Don said.

‘Who always says no?’ Robbie asked. ‘Obama?’

‘Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no.’

‘It’s in character,’ Wesley said. ‘And while events change, character never seems to.’

‘You can’t say that for sure,’ Don said. ‘We have a minuscule sample compared to the … the …’ He laughed feebly. ‘You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur.’

Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected in one, with John McCain as his running mate. In that Ur, Romney ran against Obama, who was tapped after Hillary was killed in a helicopter crash late in the campaign.

They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasn’t surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected.

Robbie wanted to check the Red Sox. Wesley felt it was a waste of time, but Don came down on the kid’s side, so Wesley agreed. The two of them checked the sports pages for October in ten different Urs, plugging in dates from 1918 to 2009.

‘This is depressing,’ Robbie said after the tenth try. Don Allman agreed.

‘Why?’ Wesley asked. ‘They win the Series lots of times.’

‘Which means there’s no Curse,’ Don said. ‘Which is sort of boring.’

‘What curse?’ Wesley was mystified.

Don opened his mouth to explain, then sighed. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It would take too long, and you wouldn’t get it, anyway.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ Robbie said. ‘The Bombers are always there, so it isn’t all luck.’

‘Yeah,’ Don said glumly. ‘Fuckin Yankees. The military-industrial complex of the sporting world.’

‘Soh-ree. Does anyone want that last slice?’

Don and Wes shook their heads. Robbie scarfed it and said, ‘Check one more. Check Ur 4121989. It’s my birthday. Gotta be lucky.’

Only it was quite the opposite. When Wesley selected the Ur and added a date – January 20, 1973 – not quite at random, what came up instead of ENJOY YOUR SELECTION was this: NO TIMES THIS UR AFTER NOVEMBER 19, 1962.

Wesley clapped a hand to his mouth. ‘Oh my dear sweet God.’

‘What?’ Robbie asked. ‘What is it?’

‘I think I know,’ Don said. He tried to take the pink Kindle.

Wesley, who guessed he had gone pale (but probably not as pale as he felt inside), put a hand over Don’s. ‘No. I don’t think I can bear it.’

‘Bear what?’ Robbie nearly shouted.

‘Didn’t you cover the Cuban Missile Crisis in Twentieth Century American History?’ Don asked. ‘Or didn’t you get that far yet?’

‘What missile crisis? Was it something to do with Castro?’

Don was looking at Wesley. ‘I don’t really want to see, either,’ he said, ‘but I won’t sleep tonight unless I make sure.’

‘Okay,’ Wesley said, and thought – not for the first time – that curiosity rather than rage was the true bane of the human spirit. ‘You’ll have to do it, though. My hands are trembling too much.’

Don filled in the fields for NOVEMBER 19, 1962. The Kindle told him to enjoy his selection, but he didn’t. None of them did. The headlines were stark and huge:

NYC TOLL SURPASSES 6 MILLION

MANHATTAN DECIMATED BY RADIATION

RUSSIA SAID TO BE OBLITERATED

LOSSES IN EUROPE AND ASIA ‘INCALCULABLE’

CHINESE LAUNCH 40 ICBMS

‘Turn it off,’ Robbie said in a small, sick voice. ‘It’s like that song says – I don’t wanna see no more.’