Сара Пинскер - Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea - Stories

I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again.

“How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?”

“Look at it this way,” Mabel said. “Either you’ll be part of a groundbreaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. Someone benefits either way. And you’ve never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly.”

She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort-hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in.

It was easy to tell who had just arrived. We were the ones planted in the lobby, bags in hand, eyes wide and mouth open. My body and face, even my expression, reflected back at me in two hundred funhouse mirrors. Stranger even than that, an energy in the air that I couldn’t quite explain, a feeling that every single Sarah had stepped through to the exact same thought, to the same curious-amazement-horror-wonder, to the same rug-yanking confirmation that the invitation had been real and we were no longer alone, or maybe we were more alone than we had ever been.

Large groups gathered around the hotel check-in desk and SarahCon registration, no doubt trying to pick themselves off the long lists of near-identical names. A third faction, which I decided to join, had adjourned to the lobby bar, hoping to use alcohol to blunt the weirdness of coming face-to-face with our multiverse selves. I found a barstool and shoved my suitcase and backpack under my feet. Space was tight amid the other suitcases and backpacks.

“The stout,” I said when I caught the bartender’s attention, pointing at the third tap handle.

He grinned and held up a glass. “Seventh one in a row. You all go for the stout or one of the good whiskeys.”

I filed that information away. Took a sip. The Sarah next to me did the same. We both put our glasses down at the same time. Both raised eyebrows at each other.

The bartender hovered. “Room number for your tab?”

“I haven’t checked in yet. Cash isn’t okay? Oh. The cross-world currency thing.”

“You can put her drink on my tab,” said the me next to me. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. I’d worn mine that way when I was thirteen.

I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. “Thanks. Appreciated.”

“My pleasure. I’ve never bought myself a drink before. Well, not like this, anyhow. Do you know how many there are altogether? How many of us here, I mean.”

I shook my head. “No clue. You could ask someone at registration.”

A third Sarah, maybe a decade older than me, joined our conversation. My parents were married years before they had me. I’d always wondered if I’d still be me if they hadn’t waited. “I’m sure she’ll tell us the numbers in her opening address.”

“She?” asked One Braid. “Sorry if it’s a stupid question. I checked into my room but I haven’t braved convention registration yet. I hate lines.”

Older Sarah rummaged in a SarahCon commemorative tote bag and pulled out a program. She turned to a bio page and started reading. “‘Sarah Pinsker [R0D0]’—I don’t know what ‘R-0-D-0’ means—‘made the discovery creating the multiverse portal. She is a quantologist at Johns Hopkins University.’” She looked up. “I think that’s her over there. She’s been rushing back and forth as long as I’ve been sitting here.”

We followed her pointing finger to a Sarah bustling through the lobby, walkie-talkie to her lips. Her hair was pixie-short, defeating the frizz that plagued me. She looked harried but better put together than most of us, elegant in a silk blouse and designer jeans that fit and flattered. I had never been anything approaching elegant. Never had the guts to cut my hair that short, either.

“Quantologist,” I repeated.

Older Sarah paged through the program. “It looks like there are four other quantologist Sarahs on the host committee.”

One Braid scratched the back of her neck. “I’ve never heard of quantology. I don’t think it’s a real field of study where I’m from.”

“Not where I’m from, either. Where are you from? I mean, answer however you want.”

“I’m from all over the place,” One Braid said. My usual answer. “But I live in Seattle.”

Eerie. “Me, too. I went out for a job after college and stayed.”

“Same! Summer job, then I met my girlfriend and settled for good. I’m in West Seattle. How about you?”

“Ballard.” I raised my glass to clink hers, though that particular girlfriend and I hadn’t lasted.

Older Sarah chugged her beer and waved for another before turning back to us. “Our Seattle was destroyed in an earthquake.”

We both stared at her. She sipped her fresh beer and continued. “I never got out west myself, so it wasn’t a personal thing for me, but it was horrible. Four thousand people died. The city never recovered.”

I pictured our little house bucking and buckling, our yard splitting down the middle. Mabel, my friends and neighbors, the coffee shop up the street. Shuddered. It was too much to imagine. “This is so damn weird.”

Older Sarah waved her program at me. “That’s the name of the first panel. ‘This Is So Damn Weird: Strategies for Navigating SarahCon Without Losing Your Mind.’”

One Braid and I both reached for our beers.

The registration line thinned as a programmed cocktail hour began in some lounge somewhere. Since I’d already been drinking for a while, I took the opportunity to check in and register.

“Find yourself on the list,” said the Sarah behind the convention registration table. I could tell she was fried, like she was already too tired to remember how to put expressions on her face. I knew that feeling.

Looking at the list, it was easy to see why she’d had a long day already. My mind was still boggling at the handful of Sarahs I’d met; she’d come face-to-face with all of us.

The list grouped us by surname first. Mine the most common, a trunk instead of a branch. I paged past, curious. Mostly Pinskers like myself. Made sense if we were the closest realities to the Pinsker who had invited us. There were other random surnames I chalked up to marriage. A full page of Sarah Sweetloves. I’d never really considered changing my name for anyone, even Mabel, but apparently others had.

After surname came city, divided evenly between Seattle, Toronto, and Baltimore, with a few outliers in Northampton, Somerville, Asheville, New York, Pretoria. After that came birthdate, occupation. The occupation list read like a collection of every “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d ever answered. Geneticist, writer, therapeutic-riding instructor, teacher, history professor, astronomer, journalist, dog trainer, barn manager. I was the only insurance investigator. In fairness, it had never exactly been on the greatest-hits list.

Address messed with me the most for some reason. Someone else here shared my full name, birthdate, and address. She worked as a program director at a non-profit. That was the only place our lines on the list differed. Where else did we diverge? Did we move around our house in the same ways at the same times? Had she fallen in love with the kitchen first, too? Did she live with an alternate Mabel?