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

She took a long drag on her cigarette. “I’d have stopped at ‘Everything,’ but, yeah, same basic theme. Pretty amazing that we’re all here despite being chicken. Afraid to ride bicycles but willing to step out of our own reality completely for a weekend.”

“Maybe it falls under ‘Afraid of missing out on something because I’m afraid’? We all push ourselves in the same ways?”

“Maybe. I guess I’ll see what everyone else answers tomorrow. You know what you didn’t list, in that long list of things you were afraid of?”

“What?” I replayed my answer in my head to figure what I might have missed.

“Dying alone, far from the people you love, surrounded by strangers who wear your face and mirror your thoughts. I would think that would make your list, since it makes mine.”

I considered. “The first part, maybe. I’m starting to get used to the second part. And I’m still more afraid of the storm than the other Sarahs.”

Lightning cracked the sky open to punctuate my sentence, close enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“Bam. Divergence point,” she said, with less enthusiasm than her smoking buddy had earlier. “I’m getting a distinctly bad vibe from all this. Do you have Agatha Christie in your world? Isolated island, bad weather. I’m still waiting for us all to be picked off one by one.”

“And yet you were standing out here all alone. So either you’re not as scared as you say, or…” As I said it, I wished I hadn’t. If I was joking, it wasn’t funny. If I was implying she was a suspect, well, everyone was except me, since I knew I hadn’t done it. That didn’t make it a smart move to address the subject directly.

“Or I’m the killer, in which case you’re the one in trouble, not me.” She gave me a look that told me she agreed my comment had been in poor taste, and held out the flask, daring me to take it. “I’m not a killer. I can’t prove it, of course, but I know I’m not. Which makes me pretty sure none of us are, because I can’t imagine the circumstance that would bring me to kill someone.”

“I can’t imagine killing someone, but I also can’t imagine the circumstance that would have turned me into a smoker.” I swigged whiskey. “Or a hotel manager, or a quantologist, or a DJ.”

She took one more drag, then dropped the butt and crushed it with her boot. “It’s the storm and the island that made me say the Christie thing. I’m way more nervous about this storm than being killed by a serial Sarah, at least while there’s still only one body. Hopefully I won’t have cause to revise that. In the meantime, there’s facing fear and there’s being stupid. We should probably go inside before we get hit by lightning.”

As if in response, the sky opened up. We were both drenched in the two feet to the doorway.

“If the lights go out, start counting Sarahs,” Orange Curls said before squelching off down the hall.

Back in my room, I stripped my wet clothes off and replaced them with another T-shirt and boxer shorts. The whiskey didn’t do the job I’d hoped it would, so I spent the night in imaginary conversation with Mabel. The rain battering the window filled in her side of the dialogue. I walked through the order of events, everything I’d found. I had ideas, but they weren’t cohering. The timing was important, I knew that. Murder weapon would be lovely, but I didn’t expect a forensic report anytime soon. As for suspects, for all the people giving me alibis and vouching for themselves and each other, it could still have been anybody.

I drifted away from the case itself. The host said she wasn’t the Prime, wasn’t the trunk of a branching tree, but she’d labeled us all in relation to her. We were all in close proximity. Even the most distant of us were still recognizable. Tiny differences. I hadn’t run into anyone who lived in a post-water-shortage America, or post-flu, or post-oil. We all knew how to flush toilets.

What would it look like if we had radiated out from me instead of the host? Or if we had all radiated out from the hotel clerk, who the quantologist had said was one of the further iterations? There were other realities between these, ones she hadn’t chosen. N Sarahs, in N realities, where N was unknowable and constantly changing. Why had she chosen us and not others? Was I the most interesting of a string of insurance investigators, or the only one available this weekend? I had more questions than I’d had before I arrived.

Why did I go into detective work, not one of the sciences? I hated my calculus teacher, dropped it after a few weeks; because of him, I didn’t get far enough in math to pursue a college major in bio or physics. Maybe he didn’t exist in the other worlds, or maybe the science Sarahs hadn’t let him get the better of them. Maybe they pushed themselves to spite him. Some went on to become geneticists or researchers or science fiction writers. Same mind, applied differently. Choices, chances, undecisions, non-decisions, decisions good and bad.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Maybe one of me was sitting at home with Mabel right at this very moment, another me, another Mabel, another reality where my curiosity hadn’t won out. But if I’d stayed home, who would be asking questions for the Sarah in the fridge? If nothing else, I was good for that. Even if I hadn’t yet found any answers.

It was still raining when I woke. The thin carpet felt vaguely damp, like the weather had come up through the foundation. My head hurt. I had a vague sense that I had unlocked something in my sleep and forgotten it again.

I took a quick shower, hoping it might clear my head. No luck.

Breakfast was served buffet style, which was good since I was ravenous after only eating a roll the night before. I built a tower of eggs, potatoes, and toast, a second tower of fruit, and deposited both plates on the nearest empty table. When I came back from the tea station, the table was full.

“How are you enjoying the weekend?” asked the Sarah next to me. I didn’t think I’d met her before. “Other than… You know.”

“I haven’t had much time to do anything,” I said between mouthfuls. “Duty called. Well, not a duty I expected to have, but I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Oh, were you the one who got pulled away from the table last night? It would be a shame if you didn’t get to go to anything.” That was Dare; I remembered him from dinner, with his copper and silver beard and mustache. His talk on gender was one I’d circled when I thought I’d get to actually attend programming. “It’s not like we’ll have this chance again.”

“You don’t think so?” another asked.

Dare shook his head. “No. Somebody died. That’s not exactly an encouragement to the backers to bring us back for a sequel. Even if it was an accident, the logistics of explaining her death on the other side of the portal will be a nightmare.”

“Infinite variations,” said another Sarah. “Maybe next year we’ll get invitations from an iteration where she didn’t die.”

That made my head hurt. “I think I need to get back to work after I leave breakfast. I still need to interview the hotel staff, and anyone who talked to her yesterday afternoon…”

My neighbor speared a chunk of pineapple and waved it at me. “Stay. One talk won’t hurt you. We’ve got a big-group discussion on ‘Horses and Dogs and Cats, Oh My’ in this room right after breakfast. All you have to do is not stand up.”

Her argument on its own might not have been persuasive, but inertia won out. Inertia and jealousy and a bad feeling I shouldn’t have eaten as much as I did and I might still be sick if I moved very quickly. Besides, everyone else had already had a chance to get to know each other a bit, and all I’d talked about was one unfortunate dead person whose death I wasn’t even supposed to be investigating anymore. I lingered as the mics were set up and the buffet tables cleared.