Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Was that the plan?’ I asked after a while.

‘Was what the plan?’

‘This. For me to fall in front of the bulls and you to rescue me. Was that the plan all along?’

I could see that he was on the point of saying something like: ‘What are you talking about?’ or: ‘I don’t understand.’ But maybe he knew that I had understood.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t the plan.’

‘No?’

‘Not to rescue you, no.’ He rested his head against the whitewashed wall of the house. I did the same thing, looking up into the cloudless sky between the rooftops.

On the side streets up and down the route they had already started to dismantle the barricades.

‘So you went to San Sebastián?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I needed to find out what had happened there.’

‘And did you find out?’

‘I saw your body.’

‘That isn’t me. At least not completely.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘It’s hard to explain. It is me, but without my feeling of a self.’

‘Is that why you were able to kill him?’

‘Yes. But it wasn’t easy. It was painful.’

‘But not so painful that you couldn’t do it?’

‘The pain of not getting Miriam would have been worse. The way I look at it, it was a necessary suicide.’

‘You had to kill yourself in order to win her?’

‘Two Peters would have been very confusing, don’t you think?’

‘Got a cigarette?’

He straightened out his legs so that he could reach into his pocket and took two cigarettes from the packet. Lit up for us both.

‘What was it the first Peter did wrong?’ I asked.

‘He failed to see that you and Miriam might have been made for each other.’ He drew on his cigarette. ‘Drop the might have been: you two are made for each other. Did you meet her in San Sebastián?’

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re two cicadas. Of course you found each other.’

‘I found her.’

‘Yes, only the male cicada sings.’

I looked at him again. He seemed older now than when we had stood waiting for the bulls. As though he’d aged ten years over a couple of minutes.

‘What happened?’ I asked, dragging on my cigarette. ‘Did you find out how to travel through time?’

‘It took me eleven years,’ he said. ‘Me and a small group of researchers in Switzerland. And you don’t travel through time, you travel between parallel universes or sequences of events. We discovered a way to slip in the back door of a parallel universe, but the problem was in finding which universe to enter, since there’s an infinity of them, and most of them are dead, cold worlds. You can’t change anything in a universe — the sequence of events is fixed — but you create new universes by moving something, even if it’s just an atom, from one universe to another. If you discover a universe that is, up to a particular point — for example, up to the morning after you rescued Miriam — identical to the one you inhabit, and you transport yourself there, a new universe is created in which you feel as though you’ve changed the sequence of events, but actually it’s simply a new one. Although actually it isn’t even really new, it’s just that you’re experiencing it for the first time. Understand?’

‘No.’

‘I discovered a way of finding universes that resemble the one you inhabit. We call it a synchronised habitat. In the universe I come from I’ll be awarded the Nobel Prize for it.’

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

‘So you slipped into this universe directly after I rescued Miriam. But why not before?’

‘Because the perfect starting point is that I saved her life. That is, that she believes I’m the one who saved her life. So I needed you first.’ He took a breath. ‘As you know, I’m unable to swim.’

I shook my head. ‘But good God, why didn’t you simply discover a universe where you get Miriam without doing anything?’

‘They exist too, of course, but they’re impossible to find, since a synchronised habitat contains only other universes that are similar. So I had to enter one of these and start to create, or to experience from within it a new one, which would hopefully be the one in which I end up getting Miriam.’

‘You really give a whole new dimension to the phrase “searching for love”,’ I said, and regretted at once my attempt to be funny. Peter didn’t seem to notice.

‘Love is the greatest,’ was all he said, following the drifting cigarette smoke with his eyes. ‘There is an infinite number of universes in which you and I sit together and have this conversation, and in which the smoke curls away in exactly this particular way. And yet another infinity with exactly this same conversation but in which the smoke curls away in a slightly different direction, or in which one particular word is replaced with another. But there is no room for these universes in my synchronised habitat. So in all of those for which I have room, you are the one who gets Miriam. And to create a happy ending for myself I need to go via them.’

‘Because love is greatest?’

‘Greater than anything else.’

‘Love is only a sensation fostered by evolution to ensure that the human race will procreate and protect its genes and its closest family members in an efficient way.’

‘I know,’ said Peter, stubbing out his cigarette on the cobblestones. ‘And yet still it is greater than that.’

‘So great that you’re willing to kill this universe’s version of yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘And me, your best friend?’

‘In theory, yes. But in practice, evidently not.’

‘First you tried to kill me, then you rescued me. Why?’

He looked down at his dead cigarette which he carried on grinding into the ground. ‘Like you said. You’re my best friend.’

‘You couldn’t bring yourself to kill me.’

‘Let’s put it like that.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘Shall we go and get some breakfast?’

We went to Jake’s. I ordered an omelette, Peter ham and coffee.

He must have thrown away the sunglasses and cap once we started running. Now, without them, I saw his hair was a slightly different shade of blond, and he had bags under eyes that had been as white as hard-boiled eggs but were now slightly dull and yellowish, with a fine tracery of veins running through them. Those teeth, however, were as white as ever.

‘Then if I’ve understood you correctly,’ I said, ‘I get Miriam and you’re unhappy for the rest of your life.’

‘That is highly likely but remember that this is a new universe I’m experiencing. All I know is that it has been the same up until the point at which I boarded it. Now, because of my transfer, there’s been a split.’

‘Is that why there’s an infinity of universes? People began moving between them, and that caused them to start splitting and—’

‘We don’t know. But it’s possible. Everything that can happen has happened. Perhaps originally there were only one or two universes, and then people discovered the passageways and the process of expansion began.’

‘In that case these universes are the creations of human beings.’

‘As opposed to?’

‘Natural creations. Or the result of physical laws.’

‘Humans are created by nature, which is created by physical laws. Everything is physics, Martin.’

I could feel the phone vibrating in my pocket but let it ring.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ I asked.

‘I’m putting together a research team with the aim of finding out how to move to another universe. The research will go ahead more quickly now since I’m already familiar with most of the other research fields.’