‘Well, Mr Wells, saving Marie Kelly encouraged me to forget about suicide and to carry on with my life. And that is what I am doing. I recently became engaged to an adorable young woman, and I am determined to enjoy her company and to savour the small things in life.’ He paused and looked up at the sky again. ‘And yet I come here each dawn to try to see the parallel world you spoke of, and in which I am supposedly living happily with Marie Kelly. Do you know what, Mr Wells?’
‘What?’ asked the writer, swallowing hard, afraid the young man was about to turn and punch him, or seize him by the lapels and throw him into the river, out of revenge for his having deceived him in such a childish way.
‘Sometimes I can see her,’ said Andrew, in an almost tremulous whisper.
The author stared at him, dumbfounded. ‘You can see her?’
Yes, Mr Wells,’ the young man affirmed, smiling like one who has had a revelation. ‘Sometimes I see her.’
Whether or not Andrew believed this, or had chosen to believe it, Wells did not know, but the effect on the young man appeared to be the same: Wells’s fabrication had preserved him. He watched the young man contemplating the dawn, or perhaps what was ‘behind’ it, an almost childlike expression of ecstasy illuminating his face, and could not help wondering which of them was more deluded: the sceptical writer, incapable of believing the things he himself had written, or the desperate young man who, in a noble act of faith, had decided to believe Wells’s beautiful lie, taking refuge in the fact that no one could prove it was untrue.
‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you again, Mr Wells,’ Andrew said, turning to shake his hand.
‘Likewise,’ replied Wells.
After they had said goodbye, Wells watched the young man cross the bridge unhurriedly, swathed in the golden light of dawn. Parallel worlds. He had completely forgotten about the theory he had been obliged to make to save the young man’s life. But did they really exist? Did each of man’s decisions give rise to a different world? In fact, it was naive to think there was only one alternative to each predicament. What about the unchosen universes, the ones that were flushed away? Why should they have less right to exist than the others? Wells doubted very much that the structure of the universe depended on the unpredictable desires of the fickle, timid creature called man. It was more reasonable to suppose that the universe was far richer and more immeasurable than our senses could perceive, that when man was faced with two or more options, he inevitably ended up choosing all of them, for his ability to choose was an illusion. So the world kept splitting into different worlds, worlds that showed the breadth and complexity of the universe, worlds that exploited its full potential, drained all of its possibilities, worlds that evolved alongside one another, perhaps only differentiated by an insignificant detail such as how many flies were in each, because even killing one of those annoying insects implied a choice: it was an insignificant gesture that gave birth to a new universe all the same.
And how many of the wretched creatures buzzing around his windows had he killed or allowed to live, or simply mutilated, pulling off their wings while he thought about how to resolve a dilemma in one of his novels? Perhaps that was a silly example, reflected Wells, as such an action would not have changed the world in any irreversible way. After all, a man could spend his entire life pulling off flies’ wings without altering the course of history. But the same reasoning could be applied to far more significant decisions, and he could not help remembering Gilliam Murray’s second visit. Had Wells not also been torn between two possible choices and, intoxicated with power, had he not opted to squash the fly, giving rise to a universe in which a company offering trips to the future existed, the absurd universe in which he was now trapped?
But what if he had opted instead to help Murray publish his novel? Then he would be living in a world similar to the one he was in now, only in which the time travel company did not exist, a world in which one more book would have to be added to the necessary bonfire of scientific novels:
And so, since an almost infinite number of different worlds existed, Wells reflected, everything that could happen did happen. Or what amounted to the same thing: any world, civilisation, creature it was possible to imagine already existed. Which meant there was a world dominated by a non-mammalian species, another by birdmen living in huge nests, another in which man used an alphabet to count the fingers on his hand, another in which sleep erased all memory and each day was a new life, another in which a detective called Sherlock Holmes really did exist, and his companion was a clever little rascal called Oliver Twist, and still another in which an inventor had built a time machine and discovered a nightmarish paradise in the year 802,701. Taking this to its limit, there was also somewhere a universe governed by laws different from those Newton had established, where there were fairies and unicorns and talking mermaids and plants, for in a universe where anything was possible, children’s stories were no longer inventions but copies of worlds their authors, by some quirk of fate, had been able to glimpse.
Did no one invent anything, then? Was everyone merely copying? Wells pondered the question for a while – and given that it is becoming clear this particular tale is drawing to a close, I shall use the time to bid you farewell, like an actor waving goodbye to his audience from the stage. Thank you very much for your attention, and I sincerely hope that you enjoyed the show . . .
But now let us return to Wells, who recovered with a start, owing to an almost metaphysical shudder running down his spine: his wandering thoughts had led him to pose another question. What if his life were being written by someone in another reality, for instance in the universe almost exactly like his own in which there was no time travel company and Gilliam Murray was the author of dreadful little novels?
He gave serious thought to the possibility of someone copying his life and pretending it was fiction. But why would anyone bother? He was not material for a novel. Had he been shipwrecked on a tropical island, like Robinson Crusoe, he would have been incapable of making so much as a clay gourd. By the same token, his life was too dull for anyone to transform it into an exciting story. Although, undeniably, the past few weeks had been rather eventful: in a matter of a few days, he had saved Andrew Harrington and Claire Haggerty’s lives by using his imagination, which Jane had taken care to point out in a somewhat dramatic manner – as though she had been addressing a packed audience he could not see in the stalls.
In the first case, he had been forced to pretend he possessed a time machine like the one in his novel, and in the second that he was a hero from the future who wrote love letters. Was there material for a novel in any of this? Possibly. A novel narrating the creation of a company called Murray’s Time Travel, in which he, unfortunately, had played a part, a novel that surprised its readers towards the middle when it was revealed that the year 2000 was no more than a stage set built with rubble from a demolition (although this, of course, would only be a revelation to readers from Wells’s own time).
If such a novel survived the passage of time, and was read by people living after the year 2000 there would be nothing to reveal, for reality itself would have given the lie to the future described in the story. But did that mean it was impossible to write a novel set in Wells’s time speculating about a future that was already the author’s past? The thought saddened him. He preferred to believe his readers would understand they were meant to read the novel as if they were in 1896, as if they, in fact, had experienced a journey through time.
Still, since he did not having the makings of a hero, he would have to be a secondary character in the novel, someone to whom others, the story’s true protagonists, came for help.
