Alternativity

I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. He seemed pretty logical. At least, he was when you weren’t holding eye contact with him. The only time he seemed a little off, a bit out of sync with the rest of the world, was when you looked at him. There was a fire in his eye, something that had been there for years but you would always feel like you just discovered. It was as if your own mother suddenly had a complete makeover and she was barely recognizable, but underneath you could just see what had been there before.



Yes, we all agreed: David was crazy. He was a loon, an insane weirdo, and a mentally ill songbird that flew in a halo over a dazed man’s head. David was the least rational person you could ever meet. He spewed words that held no meaning and yet seemed to weigh the world, hardly above a whisper. He looked at everything around him as if he were seeing it like a newborn; wondering, curious, gleeful. A sparkle that was unnatural in human eyes shone there. Some feeling was embedded in them, which our minds could not conceive as real. It was a phoenix beside our emotions, beautiful and frightening.



David was my little brother. He was the crazy one. I was the quiet one. He talked numbers. I talked three-word sentences. He was tall. I was short. While his hair was deep ebony, so as to appear blue in the right light, mine was a pale, almost grey doppelganger. He always tried to maintain eye contact. I never looked above my shoelaces. He and I were, in every aspect but one (our shared interest in clockwork), complete opposites.



So when he started saying that he knew the meaning of life, I was reluctant to hear him out.



“Donnie,” he said one day while we were enjoying the night heat of early summer. He held a ball in one hand and a racket in the other. He stared at the side of the garage like it was a monster threatening to devour him whole. Never looking away, he spoke to me. “Donnie, have you ever thought about other dimensions?”



I was slightly confused. As I thought about what he meant, I watched him toss the tiny fluorescent sun into the air and whack it into next Tuesday. The garage wall happened to be a week away, so caught the ball right in the face. It groaned in a silver voice before shimmering back to its original calm state. “Well,” I said slowly, chin perched upon my knuckle and my elbow upon my knee. “I think a dimension is something that’s close to our world… but different.” I imagined a blue fruit that by any other color would have been called an orange.



David nodded a few times as he twirled the racket in his slender hand. He possessed a complexion of ice and the ability to crisp in any weather that included sunshine. “Good. Do you think they’re real?”



Shrugging without conviction, I went to stand in his shadow cast by the porch light. “They sound pretty cool, but I don’t see a reason to think that.” My eyes followed the motion of his tennis ball as it leapt from his hand to the wall and back again. The zigzag streak of light it left behind made me feel like time was moving five times faster than it usually should. A little smile touched my mouth.



“That’s alright,” he granted, tossing his fuzzy toy from one hand to the other, creating gracefully sharp arcs in front of him. “Not many people think about it. It’s not really important.” He said this in a way that guaranteed he had more to say.



Playing along to his obvious game, I asked with an exasperated sigh, “What is it, Dave?”



His grin was wide and sudden. “Well, there are an infinite number of dimensions. I know it. I see them in my dreams, and in mirrors, and in puddles. And when it rains I see them in the windows from the inside. They’re really quite pretty, Donnie, you should look sometime.”



I felt my mouth twist in a smirk of disbelief. I thought this was just great; now I’d have to explain to my mother why our beloved David was hallucinating. I knew I would have trouble convincing her I hadn’t fed him some strange mushroom we found in the forest. “If you show me and I see what you’ve seen, then I will drop to my knees and worship you.”



He glanced at me and I saw a glint in the corner of his gaze. A tiny smile pulled his lips. “I’ll hold you to it,” he informed me. A strange feeling crawled through my body at that moment. I dismissed it as a chill breeze and watched as David curled his arm and hurled the ball against the wall. No sooner had the echo of the impact faded into silence when he threw it again, and repeated until it rang in my ears.



This happened when I was seventeen. He wasn’t far behind; as soon as I was able to sleep through the night my mother and father had decided to create another child. They decided his name about three seconds after he was born. It took them a week to give me mine.







I always had respect for his privacy. I knew he did things in the middle of the night that he didn’t want me to know about; on the other side of the room I would see the glowing aura of a flashlight under a dome of blankets atop his bed. If I listened, I could hear the scratching of a pencil on paper. He liked to draw the things he dreamed about as soon as he woke up. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he would bring one of his notebooks downstairs for breakfast and show the family his dream. The drawings were slightly disturbing… there were self portraits that looked as though he had been dead for weeks. Sometimes there would be an empty landscape littered with small scribbles that seemed to form the silhouette of men on fire.



That was his dream journal. He had a diary that he kept as well, which he wrote into at any given time. I read some of it once.



David was distracted by the squirrel in the backyard tree who he had claimed to be his girlfriend. He stood under the tree and reached up to her, bidding her leap into his arms, for an entire day. Sometimes he would come in to get a snack and chatter away about his love. Who, by the way, he had named Cody. The gender confusion went unnoticed.



I sat watching him from the second story window (he was currently hanging by his fingertips from a branch which was closer to the ground than his shoulders). He was so strange, so different from the people in my life. I was entranced by him, by the way he moved and the way he spoke. I never understood the way he thought, but it corresponded with my own mind and so we got along very well.



As I observed his odd behavior from afar, something caught my eye. We shared a desk, and it was wide and white and lonely in the corner of our room. Nothing was ever on top of it; I did my writing work mostly outside, and David never did his homework in the first place. It was the empty space that made our room feel larger and more cavernous.



Today, there was something on it. It was small and grey and it looked very uneventful. I had to look inside.



I hopped off the windowsill where I had been perched and went to explore in between the covers of this new thing I had never seen before. My fingers brushed over the pages and pulled them apart as my eyes searched.



There were rows of doors drawn inside. There were two to a page, and each one was a different color and design. I thought it was odd that they should be so detailed, as if they were material things someone had actually seen and tried to recreate. Beneath each door, there was a crooked paragraph in slanted writing. The first I read described a world where the messiah hadn’t died on a wooden cross. It told of how he had several children and they grew up wealthy and famous because of their father’s accomplishments. Faintly surprised, I turned the page a few times and found another. This door was dark red and had a golden handle. Below the door, it said that Adolf had conquered the tundra, and men bearing swastika flags had overrun the world.



My mother would have soiled her too-tight blue jeans if she had read this. I hurriedly turned the page, trying to find a door that had something less like a nightmare.



There was one, near the end of the written-on pages, and it looked just like our bedroom door. We had one that was made out of cedar, carved with the shape of a large tree with twisted branches. It was painted a slightly sickly green. David had chosen it at the age of seven.



I looked over my shoulder, gazing at the door just to be sure my mind hadn’t mixed reality with fiction. There it was, shimmering in the sunlight that fell through the blinds. Feeling slightly worried, I looked back to the book and read the story below.



I sighed with relief as soon as I was finished. In this one, David had declared himself and I skirt-wearing females. I chuckled a little and turned a few more pages, finally reaching the last. My tension about what I might find inside was slightly lessened by the blasphemy of my feminine life. As I skirted the description, my concern deepened. I couldn’t imagine living on an earth where the sun was minutes from death.



The door slammed behind me. I turned quickly, dropping the book on to lie open and exposed on the desk. David stood in the doorway, that crazy glimmer in his eyes and a grin like poison on his face.



“Whatcha lookin’ at, Donnie?” he asked sweetly, stalking nearer to me. I felt like I had walked in on a murderer doing his thing.



Turning back to the book, I slapped it shut and sat staring at the wall. “I just saw your doors,” I murmured, trying not to appear concerned for his mental health. I knew that it was already deteriorated beyond repair by that point.



The grin still stretched his mouth as he sat on the edge of the desk. He watched me steadily, as if waiting for me to break down and start sobbing my eyes out. “Did you like them?” he asked.



My shoulders lifted as I continued to search for another, safer door in the wall before me. I didn’t want to find out what this was about.



“Is that a yes or a no, Donnie?”



There was something in his voice that I had never heard before. It was sour and wanted to devour me whole. When I looked at him, I caught sight of the same hunger in his lunatic gaze. “Yes, David,” I said obediently.



“Good,” he murmured, looking down at the book like it was his only child. His hand fluttered over it, gingerly touching the cover, afraid it would spontaneously combust at his touch, yet unable to stay away. As he peeled the front back and peered down at the pages within, he spoke. “I’ve found the meaning to life, Donnie.”



“Yes, David.”



“It’s actually quite simple.” This he said as he gently turned the pages. “Remember when I asked you about dimensions? About different worlds similar to ours?”



I nodded like a child receiving a lecture about spilt milk.



“There are so many…I almost can’t keep track of all of them. But they talk to me, the other David’s. There’s one in every world. Except the one where we’re girls…in that one my name is Danielle. It’s an okay name, but I wouldn’t give it to a girl. And then there’s the one where electricity was never discovered. It’s funny to try and imagine today without a light bulb. Everyone would be so lost!”



He talked for a long time about his worlds. I had no idea where he was going with this…the fact that there were multiple lives that my soul was living was little reassurance as to the meaning of those lives. I must have been looking at him oddly, because suddenly he changed direction.



“So, say that all of the Donnie’s were to go to the same college. And marry the same girl. Or boy, in that one world…or…say that somehow, all the parts of you started working together to make all your lives somewhat similar.” He grinned triumphantly at me, like he was God and I was a puny mortal who had come to his door asking for permission to enter. “The meaning of life, I think, is to bring all of them together.”



We stared at each other for a long moment. I didn’t know what to say. He seemed to be pleased without words. Tension built up in my muscles. There was no way that he could be right about this.



Seeming to read my mind, David continued. “You know how, when something happens to you, there are a bunch of emotions in your stomach?”



I nodded to his question. I felt fear and worry and confusion, all wrapped up in one body.



He nodded as well, seeing that I understood. “One body is actually only capable of one emotion. The other ones you feel are traces of those in other worlds. So like…if you were angry and sad about your girlfriend cheating on you here, in some other world that sadness is about that girlfriend being hit by a bus. It’s hard to get, but it actually makes sense. Don’t you think?” He looked at me hopefully, eyes pleading.



I just blinked and looked back at the wall. There were no words on my tongue. This was the craziest thing I had ever heard. Other worlds? Impossible. I couldn’t conceive of the idea of my soul being split up into endless puzzle pieces. I had never heard anything like this anywhere but on the science channel. This was absurd and strange and it made me very afraid because it made perfect sense to me.



Was I crazy too, now? Or had David started making sense? I couldn’t tell which it was, nor which one I would prefer to be true. I didn’t feel any different…but David had started talking logically…I had no idea, but I knew that if I was going to continue living the life this part of me was in, I’d have to figure out how to steer clear of my other lives. It was like being reborn fifty times in one day.



“Well?”



I lifted my head to see Donnie staring at me expectantly. I took a deep breath. “Well,” I drawled, eyeing the book under his hand with reverence and apprehension. “I…think that you make a whole lot of sense…”



The twinkle in his eyes instantly turned dark. “Are you mocking me?” he asked dangerously.



Okay, time to step back. I shook my head quickly and stared up at him. “I’m not mocking you, not at all.” I waited until the frightening gleam in his eye faded into the eagerness of a child. “I really understand what you’re saying. How can you see these…other worlds?” Part of me was humoring him. Another part of me wanted to see. And yet another part of me wanted to curl up in the closet and never come out for fear of doing something that might screw with the grand play some God had created for me to act out.



“I told you, Donnie. I see it in mirrors and puddles and in my dreams.” His eyes turned to me with a sinister glow deep in them. “Would you like to see?”



A cold shiver ran up my spine and branched out across my scalp. I felt that I was meddling in something I shouldn’t have even thought about. The idea of gazing into another realm was deliciously enticing, and yet more frightening than the time I had walked home at night from the movie theatre that was two miles away. The dark terrified me, as did the concept of changing my destiny. I figured that if it was there, I would find out what it was in due time, without interference. But there was something in David’s eyes that drew me in and made all my doubts melt. I smiled like a child told there was a new bike for me if I just got into the back of the van to get it. “I would.”



David raised his eyebrows and gazed down his long nose at me. “You would what?”



“I would like if I could see,” I clarified.



His lips curled in a smile. “I bet you would.” He said it as if he were telling a private joke to an outsider. There was something brewing in his head, getting bigger each second he thought about it. I was scared to find out what it was, but my curiosity was becoming too much to bear.



After what seemed like an eternity of silence, me sitting there growing tenser every minute, him perched on the desk waiting for me to ask, I gathered my courage and put my hand on the corner of his book. He didn’t snatch it away, which I took to be a good sign. I opened my mouth a few times, unsure of which words to use. Struggling, I finally filled with the urge to speak. “David, could you please show me another world?”



His grin was instant and wide. “Of course, Donnie,” he said, eyes wide and shooting fireworks at me. He said it like he had been waiting for me to ask for years, that it was absurd of me to feel the need to even ask him. “Come on. Mom has a mirror in the basement she doesn’t use anymore. I go there at night and watch.”



He took my hand, drawing it from the journal as he pulled me out of the chair. I looked longingly over my shoulder, at the book, where the secrets had still been a form of fiction. Now that I was being dragged toward the greatest change in my life, I felt fear rising in my throat. No way could I do this…no way was I letting my crazy brother bring me to sit in front of a mirror our mother never used and stare into an unfamiliar reflection.



Before I knew what was happening, we were standing in the dark of the underground floor. The tiny window in the corner spilled some sunlight, but it was hardly enough to shed light on our situation. I looked around for a light switch, but David seemed to read my mind. He put a finger to my lips and looked up at me – he was a few inches shorter than me – and told me to stay here and just watch the mirror.



I obliged like a happy fool. My eyes trained on the faint reflection before me. Donnie was gone, but there was someone standing next to me. When I looked…I saw no one. The mirror clearly showed two people standing side by side, with faint light shining on their shoulders and the side of their faces. I looked into my own eyes, and just as I was about to scream and run upstairs, the light turned on.



There are moments when you’re watching a horror movie, and you know something is coming but you still yelp when it occurs. I looked in the mirror and saw David beside the other Donnie. He looked at me from the other side and grinned that grin. I knew then that in every world there could ever be, my brother would be an insane son of a bitch with insight into things not to be meddled with, no matter what.



I met the eyes of my other half and saw the same deep frown. His hair was a different color from mine. It didn’t look dyed, since his eyebrows matched…but it definitely wasn’t me. I turned my head slightly, eyes still locked on the reflection that wasn’t me, and opened my mouth. “Hey, David?”



I moved my eyes to look around, and he was nowhere to be seen. I turned this way and that, fear growing in my belly, until I was facing the mirror once more. The other me was looking back with the same terror. His eyes were wide and his mouth was twisted in a grimace. I knew that he truly reflected my expression.



“David?”



I realized suddenly that the other David, the one standing next to my reflection, was gone. Well, not gone…I could see him coming up behind Donnie Two, like a shadow creeping closer. I stared, horrified, unable to do anything but watch as David Two peered over his brother’s shoulder and grinned at me. I stared into his lunatic eyes and saw that he wasn’t actually smiling at me…but something behind me.



At that moment I felt breath on the back of my neck. My eyes snapped to the other me, and we both knew at that moment that something potentially horrible was about to happen.



I felt two hands push hard on my back, sending me reeling into the mirror. Except…I didn’t stop when I should have. I saw the other me being pushed forward similarly, and then suddenly I was on my hands and knees on the ground, with no mirror in sight. I swiveled my head and saw David standing next to me, dusting his hands off like a cartoon character that had just gotten away with a crime. My eyes followed his legs and his body all the way up to his face…and then the horror hit me.



This wasn’t my brother. This was the other David. I fell to the side and turned to see the mirror stretched above me, and the image I saw sitting there was the other me, eyes still wide, the same horror on his face that I felt in my heart. I saw David, the real David, standing over him with the hungry, Cheshire cat grin on his face. I scrambled toward the glass, my hands lifting and pressing hard to it.



“Let me back!” I yelled, banging a fist into the mirror. It didn’t break. It hardly even vibrated. The other me was crying. I beat harder, trying to shatter it but only succeeding in bruising the side of my hand. Then a strong hand pulled my shoulder back, and I looked up into the black hole eyes of my “brother”.



“Welcome home, Donnie,” he whispered, that terrifying grin stretching his face.



But he wasn’t my brother. I didn’t have a brother. I only had a mad relative who happened to push me into a world that was somehow different from mine. I looked desperately to the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of what David was doing to the other me. There was nothing but the faint sunlight that glimmered on a few inches of the cold concrete floor.



“Welcome home.”