fiction

Push the button

by rebecca chekouras

What if Death loves us? Of all the thoughts that raced through my mind during the last wildfire, that one stopped me cold. Still, I evacuated. Came back. Returned to a place of fire and earthquake, of flood and nightly news. I’ve become handy at this, at dodging, escaping and yet every new alarm touches off another wave of decisions about the same thing—the possessions that have stuck to my life, that I have claimed as evidence of my life, and of these what will I abandon this time, its weight too much to carry forward from here. The last move, the one that brought me here, boxed up or ditched ten years of living in a gaping industrial loft. In a fury of disappointment and freedom, I gave away, threw away, or sold almost everything I owned. I didn’t have much inventory to work with when the first fire roared down on me and the sheriff patrolled our street beating on doors. Under the purifying sweep of a 70,000-acre wildfire, I had sixty minutes to cull what was left of my life. It should’ve been easy, having already whittled down to hermit level. And yet. And yet. I considered the “keeps” from my last move. They carried, shadow-like, the added emotional weight of everything I’d left behind. Each plate or photograph or book weighed as much as a black hole. When the evacuation order came, the sheriff, the cruiser, the blaring voice of emergency at my back, I assembled a future from scraps of the past and drove my personal archaeology to nowhere certain. When it was safe, that time when we thought we knew we were safe, I brought it all back. 

Those choices baffle me now. Like this brittle scrap of paper on which twenty years ago I’d jotted down my speed dating questions, when that was a thing. A partial list:

• You need sunglasses: Nordstrom’s or gas station?

• The exact moment you’re peaking, you reach for your vibrator and . . . the batteries are dead. Is your toothbrush an acceptable substitute? Do you leave the swirling round brush head on?

• Can you pull a baked potato from the oven with your bare hand?

***

Death is more present for being invisible. Outside, my neighbor walks by in his thick-soled Doc Martins, black latex gloves, safety goggles, and face mask. He carries a gallon of bleach. The mace swinging from his belt is for coyotes who come down from the hills to work the dumpster now that there is no one to chase them away. He’s shaved his head. I lift my hand. He nods but doesn’t stop. Evacuating and sheltering in place are different galaxies. I am not running from Death. It does not chase me down with a jaw spitting fire. I am hiding from Death, wary that at my slightest move the virus will turn its head, find my eyes, and smile. I huddle, hold my breath. I wash my hands until they crack. I’ve learned to distinguish between terror and horror. Horror shrank my soul. When fire came, the aperture of my attention wound down to a pinprick and I leapt through that tiny escape hatch to safety on the other side. Terror is soul expanding. Now, an invisible microbe that could be anywhere, on anything waits to eat me. My mind leaps for the safety of a thousand rabbit holes. 

I open that wormhole drawer in the kitchen, the one we all have, and rummage through my scant history. I find a picture of me with my arm around the woman I captured with my clever speed dating. I’m trying to remember where she is now. I do recall that in the final seconds of our two-minute date, I pulled a scrap of paper and pencil from my purse. Infatuated with my own charm, I handed them to her. “Think of your favorite love song,” I said. She poised the pencil, waited for further instruction. I loved her for it. “Write the one line that absolutely shatters you. I’ll do the same on the other side.” 

Her side: Oh me, oh my, I’m a fool for you baby.

My side: Let me ride on the wall of death one more time.

A perfect match. We would both leave the relationship empty, ruined, with our hearts hanging from our torn chests.

I live alone now. I have for years. Karma has me locked down under a Three Strikes law. If I break one more heart, I will go straight to hell. I don’t mean when I die. I mean a hole will open in the earth and a hand will reach up and take me. Where did I go so badly wrong? I pull my phone from my back pocket and tap the Universe Splitter icon. I’ve been saving this, my personal nuclear option, for Armageddon.

With this app, I can redirect a difficult juncture by positing two opposing outcomes—A or B—and with the press of a button ping my choices to the University of Geneva in Switzerland where a universe splitter, identified only as a “quantum device,” will fire a particle of light into a mirror that sends the photon either left or right. Left represents outcome A, right outcome B. Here’s where it gets tricky. An entire century of progress in theoretical physics assures me the same particle, one only, goes in both directions. Simultaneously. In my universe, I see only one outcome because the other, my opposite choice, has gone to a parallel universe created the moment the photon bi-located. Each universe holds one of my choices where it is true. Each outcome exists, one as real as the other. Because I will have fucked with the Universe. I can accept this. 

The trick is to condense the two variables into workable choices. I think of my speed date lover. I haven’t said her name in twenty years. Outcome 1: I didn’t abandon the relationship to avoid the pressure of relentless exposure and I am loved. Outcome 2: I left; I am alone but I am better for it. The Universe Splitter will rearrange what I take of myself into the future. I need to exercise the greatest care. The entirety of my life after this virus depends on two small boxes on my phone. I tap the first box. Galaxies gyre in my hand. 

Box 1: I am myself. 

Box 2: I am someone else. 

My finger hovers. All I need to do is push the button. When I do, the universe will split into two, parallel and duplicate universes where I will do both. Eat the apple. Live in the Garden. But is Myself the person who runs or the one who stays? 

This wrinkle disfigures the process because I, the one posing the question, operate only in this universe and despite the accepted physics of universe bifurcation, can only ever operate in this universe, the one I’ve always known, while in the dual universe operates another me with no knowledge of this me or this question—a duplicate world except for the one thing that matters. It can’t change the person I am in the life I live here. Now. I am not better for leaving. I know Myself is not who I want to be. That being someone else is unattainable. I don’t know how to express what I want. 

I change Box A to Fire and Box B to Virus. 

I push the button. 

In a burst of light I can’t see, a new universe peels away to some place I can’t go. 

Maybe Death wants me as a lover might, with outstretched arms and open mouth. How many more universes am I allowed to create? Would another be selfish? But what if, when I push the button a second time, I get the questions right and another new universe springs up where it all works out and everything is good? Where a parallel Me eats breakfast with the woman I abandoned. Maybe in that universe, Death, the completion of my turn at bat, does not harvest me as meat but welcomes me home victorious, a Champion.

Note: Universe Splitter is a real “quantum decision maker” app developed by Aerfish LLC and offered wherever you get your apps. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics may, like everything else in the universe we inhabit, be Googled.

Rebecca Chekouras is an American fiction writer and essayist. She lives in California.
Follow her on Twitter: @RChekouras and Instagram: @rchek

Rebecca donated to the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation.