Chapter 3 — An Entity After Infinity
[Rentica Central Medical, Ward 7, Room 12 — 6th day of 10th month, year 2048 — 3:12 PM]
Here's a thought that nobody asked for: you live in something that doesn't exist, and I don't mean nothing because nothing is its own category don't be cute, I mean something so laughably small compared to the rest of whatever-this-all-is that calling you a something at all is a bookkeeping courtesy, reality is just the file you happen to be open in and whether your life means anything is the one variable you control and the universe doesn't check the box for you — will power, stick it on a bumper — and I had about two seconds to come to terms with all that before the asteroid hit so let me back up. Mom was gone by then, she'd walked out five minutes earlier to yell at dad on the phone about hospital food markups which meant Veronica and I were alone, which meant I was propped up on a tilting mattress in a glass-walled recovery room on the seventh floor of Rentica Central Medical with the blinds half-drawn and the evening sun cutting a bronze stripe across the foot of the bed and the air smelling like rubbing alcohol and the overcooked chicken from someone's dinner cart down the hall, and under all of that Veronica's perfume — some actress-tier sandalwood thing that had been slowly bleeding into my pillow for two days that I liked more than I was ready to admit. She hadn't let go of my hand since my eyes opened, her thumb running a slow compulsive circle across my knuckles, her nails bitten down during the coma stretch with no polish and no pretense, this was not Veronica Wayne the glamour actress who walked red carpets in silver fabric that looked wet under the lights, this was Veronica in her field-notes mode — hair wrangled into a rough bun with fly-aways sticking up at three angles, an oversized gray cardigan pulled over borrowed hospital scrubs, reddened eyes, a small cut on her lower lip from where she'd bit it waiting for me to wake up, no makeup, a freckle on the bridge of her nose two shades darker than the skin around it that I'd never noticed before. *I swore to whatever was listening that if he woke up I wouldn't play cool and I don't know if I'm keeping that.* — Veronica. Then she asked if I really didn't remember her not even a little bit and I told her not even a little, she'd changed her whole silhouette, I'm not a wizard, the pony tails were armor, they were a full defensive system, they were the reason three nerds in our year tried to write her letters and two of them cried, she took the pony tails off and became her and I didn't have the resolution, and she asked only three? and I said I kept a list and she laughed quiet and her shoulders dropped for the first time in what looked like forty-eight hours straight of holding them near her ears, and somewhere down the corridor a nurse's pager chirped out a muted pop song neither of us knew and somebody two rooms over was coughing in the polite tight way of someone who doesn't want to be the one who ruined the afternoon. I told her about the concept, not the whole thing because I was still figuring out the whole thing, I told her about the clock room and the hallway and the doors with their notes and the way time at the bar had sat on 12:12:12 like a coin that wouldn't stop spinning, and when I got to the twelve doors she squeezed my hand hard enough to make the IV tape pull and said you picked one, yeah, without reading it, yeah, you dumbass, in my defense the handwriting was bad, and I almost told her about the other dream too — the one from the week before with the other hallway and the door marked *what if I knew all about my concept* that I'd had my hand on the knob of when mom sprayed water in my face and said it's good that you woke up it would have been to late — but I didn't because I hadn't figured out what "too late" meant yet and you don't bring an open question you can't close to a woman who already thinks you're a dumbass, so I filed it back with the other receipts, and the thing about receipts you file is they come back. She told me her side, she'd seen my name on her mom's tablet the night before the setup and almost set the tablet on fire, her mom had been quietly tracking my bartending career for three years through an old classmate's cousin who still worked at Mamacitas and apparently thought I was "sweet but sad," and my social media bio *advanced class conceptor, water, 60k followers* was a running joke in their family group chat, her aunt Clarisa called me the little wet prince and I laughed so hard the IV line kinked and a machine somewhere beeped in protest. Forty-five minutes we talked, for forty-five real minutes, she told me about bringing two napkins to lunch in the east courtyard because one of them was the excuse to walk past my bench, she told me her first role was a corpse on a detective show and she'd used that paycheck to buy her father a watch that was buried with him, I told her about the twelve concept books and the Time Man at Mamacitas who paid his tab at 12:12:12 twice, the sun shifted, the bronze stripe crawled up the blanket to the hem of her cardigan, her forehead got the light and I could see a tiny scar shaped like a comma I'd never noticed before. So what happens now, she said, a softness laid down on the end of the sentence like a coin on a table, and I said I come home when they let me out, dad's making me go to the event on the 12th, you'll be there too probably, wear the pony tails one time for me, absolutely not, fine then I'll sit next to you and pretend I belong and you can introduce me to three producers whose names I'll forget on purpose, deal — and right on the tail of that one-word answer she leaned down and kissed me careful this time, no teeth, just her mouth pressed against mine like she was putting a book back on its shelf, I closed my eyes for a heartbeat, my chest did something ridiculous, the rest of my life if I'd been forced to guess at its shape ten minutes earlier had felt like a long hallway I was going to walk through one bored step at a time and in that heartbeat it rearranged itself into a short bright room with a door standing open, the door, the door I'd opened, the note on the door, *as soon as my wife-to-be confesses to me an asteroid hit our planet and we all died* — I had read the first half, I had absolutely definitely not read the second half, I'd stepped through like a dipshit and the word "confess" was doing a very specific thing in my memory right now and I said Veronica — and the window behind her went white.
You have never seen a white that bright, a brightness shaped like subtraction like someone had pulled the color out through a hole in the air, the glass didn't shatter so much as forget to exist, the sun did the same a second later, somewhere between the first and second heartbeat I heard a sound that wasn't a sound — the absence of all the other sounds rushing in at once to fill where the sound would be — and then the whole seventh floor went sideways and Veronica's eyes went very wide and the cardigan she was wearing caught the edge of the light and printed itself onto my retinas in negative, a shadow of a person where a person had just been, and I died, we all died, the third planet died, the Zirconian system lost a world in under four seconds and most of it didn't even know the name of what killed it, except I wasn't dying, nothing came for me, no tunnel no review no warmth no god, just cut, like someone pressed mute on reality and I kept existing in the silence. The place I was in after that wasn't dark, darkness is a property of places and this had no property of anything, I was there and aware of being there and that was all the information available, no up no down no body no breath — except I had breath because I could hear myself using it and a body because I could feel it shaking — and I cried so hard I lost the shape of my face for a while, could've been a day could've been four minutes rearranged to feel like a day, I kept seeing Veronica's mouth opening to say my name, I kept hearing the non-sound, I kept replaying the note on that door and the half of the sentence I hadn't bothered to finish because I thought I was picking a cute rom-com tier future — dipshit, world-class dipshit, her mom tracked me for three years through a cousin who thought I was sweet but sad and I killed her daughter in a room she'd never even seen because I couldn't take two extra seconds to read a sign — and somewhere around the wringing-out stage I passed out, which is funny right, you faint in the afterlife, who faints in the afterlife, me, I do. When I came back there was a door, just one, right in front of me, stupid little door wrong scale like someone had drawn it on a napkin and propped the napkin in mid-air, it had a photo taped to it and I leaned in — the photo was a meme, an actual dumb low-res cheebs meme, one of those round-headed cartoon cats drawn with four lines, crooked eyes, short legs, a dot for a mouth, a caption in that font every fourteen-year-old used in 2041 and it said **u ok king?**, and I laughed, I don't know why, I laughed for a long time, the laugh started as a real laugh and turned into the other kind halfway through, the kind where your ribs aren't sure what's happening and your face just does what it wants, then I opened the door.
The door opened onto a tunnel that went down, not straight down, portals-down, like someone had stacked doorways inside doorways and told them all to fall at once, the first one swallowed me clean, the second caught my lip and slipped me through, the third and the fourth and at some point I stopped counting and started flailing — cities flicked past me in the spaces between doors, a beach with two moons, a street I recognized from when I was nine, a room with an iron chair bolted to concrete that made my stomach clench for a reason I couldn't name, and then one portal wider than the others and I was looking straight into a desert the color of dried blood under two suns low on the horizon, a cluster of low stone buildings half-swallowed by the dunes, and a small knot of people in robes that were not the robes of anyone I'd ever seen on the third planet, and at the front of them a young man maybe twenty-one stood looking up with his hand raised, dark hair cropped close, a book tucked under his arm that had no title on its spine, his mouth moving around a question in a language I didn't have, and for a half-second his eyes crossed mine through the crack in the door and I swear to whatever's running this he saw me back, and then the portal closed and the next one took me and there was a sky full of teeth and more doors more doors more doors, I was falling faster than any rule of anywhere should have allowed, my ears weren't popping because there was nothing to pop against, the air had opinions about my shape and the opinions were not flattering, at some point a real physics was going to catch up with me and end this sentence with a period, and then something very large said in a voice like six voices an eighth-second apart — *that's quite enough of that* — and the fall stopped. I didn't hit a floor, the floor had decided to meet me halfway, I was standing on a surface that kept almost-being a surface without committing, the air around me gone thick and warm like the pause before a thunderclap, and the thing in front of me was not a person exactly, person-shaped if you squinted, gigantic, robed — except the robe was made of what I can only describe as stitched-together night, fabric that moved like cloth but had pinpricks of star caught in the folds, the kind of fabric you could fall into a sleeve of and be gone — tall enough that I gave up trying to find its head and focused on the part I could see which was a chest-height region where two enormous hands were folded in front of it, each hand with the wrong number of fingers, not more not less, wrong in a way my brain refused to count, its face when I forced myself to look up for it made of script, actual moving writing, tiny characters crawling across each other to suggest eyes and a mouth constantly rearranging, the characters weren't in any language I had but every time a new one settled into the eye-shape I had the uncomfortable feeling it had just read me, and behind it the Gate of Existence — that's what it called itself later, right then I just saw what I saw, a vault that wasn't a vault, a chamber without edges full of doors, thousands, tens of thousands, floating at every angle every size, some cracked open enough to leak a slice of somewhere-else, one of them leaking rain, one of them leaking someone else's song on a string instrument I couldn't name, the floor I wasn't quite standing on had veins of light running under it in patterns my eyes kept trying to read as sentences. *Fifth. Another one through the meme-door. The last ones that came this way called themselves Reasoners, and the house still has their fingerprints on the hinges.* — The Gatekeeper. The thing folded its hands tighter and said Guest, with every syllable overlapped, a half-dozen versions of the same word chasing each other's tails, you arrived with no key, the gate opened anyway, we have questions about that, you don't have the answers, it's fine, and I tried to say something and it said it's fine again, and I asked where am I because you have to start somewhere and it said *the Gate of Existence, all doors of all rooms of all the houses of the world, you are standing at the hinge*, am I dead, *you were briefly, in a possibility, you are not now in the one you are from, these are different answers*, okay, and I wiped my face with the back of my hand and the hand came back wet, which was useful — I could cry here, good to know — am I going to, like, real die, *not today, today you are something much less convenient, you are After Infinity* — and the words landed in the middle of my chest and stayed there, *After Infinity*, two words doing a lot of work, I didn't know what they meant and I also in some bone-level way I'm still not comfortable with did, and it kept going, *you have crossed every possibility, not all at once not in a line, through, you have been the boy in every room, you have been the corpse in most of them, you exist after the count is closed, the universe is an addition problem and you are the period at the end, it is not an honor, it is an accounting error that we have decided is cheaper to permit than to correct*, what does that mean I get to do, *everything, briefly, fifty minutes at a time, past that the possibility kills you and the reality you are anchored to — the one with the bed, the woman, the perfume you cannot name — pulls you back, you will learn to feel the countdown, do not test it, the return is not gentle* — and then it paused, if it pauses, if pausing is a thing it does, and the script on its face slowed halfway through a rearrangement, and it said *your mother has stood between you and the wrong door once already, the door in the hallway you did not walk the last step into, the one marked about your concept, that door is not a door for you to open alone, it would have finished you before the universe finished computing what you were, she was not wrong to pull you out, there are answers you are not yet the right shape to hold, and on the day you are the right shape the door will still be there, she will not* — and I opened my mouth to ask about her, about how she knew, about what she knew, about what "she will not" meant and whether I was supposed to carry that sentence home with me like a wet coat, but the script-face had already rearranged into something that wasn't a smile but sat in the same spot, *I cannot tell you more, I am a door, I am not the house*, and it touched its palm flat against my forehead with the wrong-fingered hand, the Gate of Existence folded itself up like a map and tucked itself neatly behind my eyes, and the last thing I saw before reality reached in and scooped me back was the script on the Gatekeeper's face rearranging itself into a word I almost understood.
[Rentica Central Medical, Ward 7, Room 12 — 6th day of 10th month, year 2048 — 3:57 PM]
I came back between one blink and the next, same bed, same bronze stripe of sun crawled two inches further up Veronica's cardigan, same Veronica — alive, whole, thumb still running its slow circle across my knuckle, completely unaware that she had died in a parallel forty-five minutes ago and been confessed to and kissed on the mouth by a man who then watched her evaporate, the window intact, the asteroid in this reality not yet decided to exist. Something new was humming quiet just behind my eyes, a frame, a window inside my vision, I looked at it without looking at it and a list scrolled up through the corner of my sight in small clean characters — **REALITY — ANCHOR STABLE** / *possibilities available: ∞* / *window per slot: 50:00* / *countdown: idle* — it was a game HUD, I'd been handed a game HUD by a cosmic entity in a hospital while recovering from dying in a timeline that didn't technically happen to this me, and I laughed quietly, more an exhale than a laugh, and Veronica caught it and raised an eyebrow, what, nothing, just had a long day longer than it looked, you've been lying in this bed for forty-five minutes since you woke up, yeah, I squeezed her hand and her thumb stopped its circle and caught mine and held it, her pulse a soft fast tap against the inside of my wrist, feels longer, and she leaned in and rested her forehead against mine, her breath warm and smelling faintly of the mint a nurse must have given her, the blinds clicked against the window in the AC draft, down the hall the nurse's pager chirped its dumb little pop song for the third time that hour, and behind my eyes the HUD ticked one slot into place and went quiet — patient, waiting for the first time I'd be stupid enough to reach for it — and I thought for a second about mom standing over me with a water bottle telling me it would have been too late, and about a young man with a titleless book in a desert the color of dried blood, and about whatever a house with fingerprints on its hinges was supposed to mean, and then I stopped thinking about any of it because Veronica's pulse was fast against my wrist and I could feel hers slowing to meet mine, and I closed my fingers tighter around her hand and let the one reality I was anchored to stay the one I was in.
The End.