The Switch Read online

  While I made the rounds of the bases trying to figure things out, this kid came up to me. Out of nowhere. A little guy, but shaped kind of like a barrel—wider in the middle than on either end. He might not have been that much younger than me, but he hadn’t gotten his growth spurt yet. Part of his shape came from the fact that he was wearing a baseball catcher’s face mask, chest protector, and knee and elbow pads, too, like a kid whose mother had overdressed him for winter.

  “You pitch ‘em, I’ll catch ‘em,” was what he said to me, in a slightly nasal voice.

  “Huh?” I noticed his empty mitt. “I don’t have a ball. And anyway, I suck at—”

  Suddenly a baseball slapped against leather. I swear it had not been in his hands before.

  “I do,” he said.

  I gaped at the ball. “How did you do that?”

  “When you’ve been out here for as long as I have, you learn a few tricks,” he said.

  “Out where?”

  “You pitch ‘em, I’ll catch ‘em,” he repeated.

  He clearly wasn’t in the mood to answer my question. I decided the best way to open him up was to play catch with him and let him try out all that stiff new leather. “Okay,” I said. “I don’t have the greatest pitching arm in the world, but I’ll give it a shot.”

  The kid was off his nut with joy, like nobody had ever played with him before. He practically skipped over to home plate. He tossed the ball, which smacked into my hands with a sting. I took a pitcher’s stance and tried to look like I knew what I was doing.

  “Do you live around here?” I called out.

  “I do right now,” he said, deepening the mystery. Then he added, “And I was born here, too. So I guess I have a kind of connection.”

  “No kidding.” I wound up. “Right here in Chicago?”

  “Right here in Lincoln Park.”

  He was talking, so I decided to ask: “And what day is it?”

  “Tuesday,” he said.

  “I mean…what date on the calendar?”

  “Tuesday, April second,” he said, impatiently. “Pitch the ball already.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. In my real life, yesterday had been April 1, which meant I was back in synch.

  But just in case. “What year?”

  “Two-thousand-eight.” He held up his mitt. “Put it right here!”

  I froze. “You’re off by few years,” I said, my tongue feeling numb. “I didn’t even live here in 2008. I was eight years old in 2008. You sure about your math?”

  I wound up for the pitch and let go just as my arm reached its maximum extension. A second later, the ball thwacked into his mitt with a force strong enough to knock the kid backward.

  “Wow,” he said. “Guess you were hustling me about that arm.”

  But I hadn’t been. I can’t pitch. My arm doesn’t snap the right way. This time, however, it had. It must’ve been a fluke. Or was I was somehow still the guy with all the trophies?

  I decided to throw him a curve ball. “You know who’s got a good arm? Not for baseball, but for basketball. President Obama.”

  His eyes drew a blank behind the mask. Then he scratched himself and said, “Hit me again.”

  The second pitch was even faster and harder. He was over the moon. “Wow!” he said again. “Wow. You could go pro.”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Before I ran into you, I couldn’t hit the broadside of a truck.”

  The most unusual feeling crept over me. I had somehow acquired a new physical ability. Then I recalled that my new mom hadn’t been worried about my heart. I decided I’d throw this kid a real curve ball and see what he did.

  “It must be the multiverse,” I said.

  It should have drawn another blank expression, but instead, he lifted up his catcher’s mask, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Where did you start from?”

  I set off slowly toward home plate. “Did you say what I think you said?”

  “Whaddayou think I said?” he asked.

  “You asked me where I started from. As in what year, what time, what place, right?”

  “Right. I could tell you tunneled in the minute I saw you.”

  I hung there for a few seconds, tossing the ball, trying to let the Chicago street sounds anchor me in a familiar place. Then I walked straight up to him and said, “Tunneled in?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said. “From another, well…another reality.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “You’ve got smoke trails. Visual echoes. When you move. That means you’re in transit.”

  I remembered seeing something like these behind Amy Greenspan and the other kids when I was adjusting to my first switch. Like a kind of double-vision. Between two worlds.

  “So you—you got switched, too?” I asked.

  “More times than I can count. I’m a long way from home.” He took off the mitt and held out his hand. “Gordon. Gordon Nightshade. It comes from some old Dutch name that my great-grandfather changed when he came to America.”

  “Okay, Gordon Nightshade. I’m Jacobus. Jacobus Rose. Which is English, I guess. Unless it’s German or something that used to have a lot more syllables. You said you were born here?”

  “Yeah…but not here,” he said. “Not in this reality.”

  “Was your switch in the little red house on the truck?” I asked.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “Mine was in the basement of an old bombed out church.”

  “Bombed out?” I actually felt myself gulp.

  “It was in another country. Syria. Where my parents were aid workers. It was bad. That church basement was kind of like my refuge. I even wrote on the old whitewashed ceiling NIGHTSHADE WAS HERE with a piece of burned wood. Like some tagger. It’s probably still there.”

  The wind rattled the budding tree branches that hung over the backstop and it sounded like Chinese music.

  “How long have you been…lost?”

  “Since my fourteenth birthday,” he said. “As far as I can figure, that’s about eight months ago. But it feels like years. And maybe it is.”

  “Eight months! Holy— How are you doing it? I mean, where are your parents and stuff?”

  I tossed him the ball.

  “I’m a floater.” He shrugged. “I might not ever get home, even though I’d like to. There’s a bunch of us. I mean, not like hundreds, but quite a few. The one thing we have in common is that we all keep switching. In a weird way, you get used to it. Like you’re a kid actor on one of those TV soap operas. You walk onto the set and you’re like, ‘Okay, so what’s the script for today?’ Your parents are always some version of your parents because really, if you think about it, you could only be born to one set of parents. But lots of things change. And you meet people who’ve been out longer than you…and you learn things from them.”

  He slapped the ball on his mitt, and I got the point.

  “But wait a second,” I objected. “Like I said, I wasn’t even in Chicago in 2008.”

  “No,” he said, with great authority, like he was some damn oracle from the mists of time. “This is the reality where your parents had you six years earlier.”

  I gave him my most interrogational look. “How the hell can you know that?”

  “I just do,” he said. “Things come to you when you float. So, about your parents—how old are they?”

  “Jeez, I guess my dad’s about fifty and my mom’s forty.”

  “So, see?” he said. “They could easily have had you six years earlier. Heck, seventeen years earlier, if they’d known each other.”

  I just stared and shook my head. And then it hit me. “Wait a second,” I said. “You said six years earlier. I’m not even going to ask how you know that, but you’re off a year. It would have to be seven years earlier, because I’m fifteen. I never forget that. I’m as old as the century.”

  “Not in this world, you’re not,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “Wait—you’re sayi
ng I’m only fourteen? I’m still in middle school?”

  “I know. It’s nuts.”

  “Gordon,” I said. Something was bugging me. “We’ve only had a year of sex ed, but as far as I understand the whole sperm-egg thing, if my parents had had me six years earlier, I wouldn’t be the same person.”

  “Maybe you’re not,” he said, with that same authority. “At least, not on the outside. But the you that’s really you—the one that can travel—that doesn’t change. It’s kind of like it’s there all along and just rides with you wherever you go. At least, that’s how it looks to me.”

  “Like a soul, you mean?” And off his slight nod, “But are you also saying I could be someone else on the outside?”

  “It’s possible,” Gordon said. “I wouldn’t know, because I’ve only met this Jacobus. See what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Hmm. Can we…would you mind if we walked a little bit? I think I need an Orange Julius.”

  “Sure,” said Gordon. “What’s an Orange Julius?”

  It was that time of a Chicago early April afternoon when the sun is low and the winter bite comes back into the air. The shadows are long and blue, and all you really want is to be in a warm, cozy place with your parents and your computer, and some good smells coming from the kitchen, and all the familiar colors and sounds and objects that let you know this is your life.

  But that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  “Do you think there’s a way to get back to where we started, Gordon?” I had to ask, even though I feared the answer.

  He still had the catcher’s mask cocked back on top of his head, and his new, still not broken-in leather kneepads and chest-guard creaked when he walked. He had told me a minute ago that an earlier version of his parents had sent him to a child psychologist because they were worried he was autistic, and the psychologist had said that he “had a great need for protection,” and so they had gone and bought him a catcher’s outfit. A catcher’s outfit! And they thought he was crazy?

  “Yeah. I do,” Gordon said in answer to my question. “Look.” He stooped to pick up one of those decorative rocks people put under their bushes. “It’s like this.” He knelt on the sidewalk, a task for which the kneepads came in handy, and proceeded to draw chalk lines on concrete: six of them, stacked like a layer cake. Then he traced each line out to three dimensions as a rectangular plane, so they were now like super-thin sheets of paper sandwiched in space. I could tell he’d done this a few times and practiced in between because he was good. He drew a very curvy line that entered the top layer and then wove its way like a needle and thread through the rest of them, finally coming out the bottom in a completely different place with an arrowhead on the end.

  “I figure,” he said, “it’s a series, like those number questions we get on I.Q. tests at school. A series, and a cycle, and cycles have to repeat themselves. If I drew this in four dimensions, x-y-z-t, it wouldn’t be flat like this. More like a kind of wheel made from a deck of cards. Eventually, we’d get back to the card we started with. But we’d need a map, which I don’t have yet.”

  “Where do we get a map?” I asked.

  “I suppose from a mapmaker,” he answered, moving on.

  “But Gordon,” I said. “If that many worlds theory is right, there are like a gazillion of those cards. It could take that many lifetimes to get back to the start.”

  “That’s one theory.” He shrugged. “But I have my own. I think there are shortcuts between connected worlds, like the way you and me are connected to Chicago, and whoever the jokers are that put the switches in want us to know about ‘em. Us, as in kids our age, ‘cause no grownup would ever pull that switch and no little kid would have the muscles. Maybe they figure they should shock us with the truth when we’re young, but not too young to understand it.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked. It seemed like the obvious question.

  “Hell if I know,” he said.

  We walked on, leaving the drawing behind on the sidewalk, where it would soon enough be washed away by a Chicago spring rain.

  “Why do you figure they’d want us to know about this?”

  “Because that’s the way it’s always been with heroes. They journey out, battle dragons, get lost in enchanted forests and stuff, but eventually they return to tell the tale. Otherwise, there’d just be one never-ending story, and no one would ever hear it.”

  “You’re a pretty unusual kid, aren’t you?”

  “Any kid would be,” he said. “After what I’ve seen.”

  The Orange Julius shop sent a ray of warm, Florida light into the darkening street. It was there in this world…maybe because it was 2008, and maybe just because it was.

  At the corner, we crossed paths with a mom and two little girls. The older one was about seven and looked up at me as she skipped past. It was a look like we shared a secret.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  “What?” Gordon asked.

  “That’s my— That’s a girl from my class. Jemma. I know her. But she’s—”

  “Seven years younger,” he said. “Get used to it, kid. It’s gonna get weirder.”

  fter the Orange Julius, which Gordon thoroughly enjoyed, he said he was heading home, wherever that was. He asked me to come back with him, said his parents wouldn’t care because in this version of his life, they were the not-caring type. Not in a bad way, just not all that concerned with his coming and going. Still, it rattled me to think I might see these people once and never again, so I said, “I think I better go meet my own parents. I kind of hope they’re the not-caring type, too.”

  We walked together for about two blocks before splitting up. Our shadows, long and purple, moved ahead of us, six steps farther into the future than we were. Gordon’s, with his catcher’s gear, looked like an astronaut, or maybe a Mutant Ninja Turtle.

  “One word of advice?” he said, after a while.

  “Hmm?”

  “If you keep in mind what I told you—that the real you doesn’t change—you’ll be able to deal with anything. You’ll be able to float.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to float. Floating might feel like falling, and I wasn’t big on giving up control.

  “How ‘bout we meet back at the playground, same time tomorrow, no matter what?” he proposed.

  “Okay, but—”

  “Just don’t pull the switch today, okay?” he said firmly. “Let it go until we hook up again. I’m working on a plan.”

  “I’m down for that,” I said, with as much cool as I could manage. Gordon was my new best friend, possibly my only friend, considering that otherwise I was pretty much alone in this thing.

  I did have two nagging questions, though.

  “You said before that there were other kids…like us.”

  “Sure there are.” He pulled down his catcher’s mask for the last leg. “You think you’re the only kid curious enough to pull that switch?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “So we work together on this?”

  “Right. Together.”

  “But—” I had to ask. “What if the world you’re trying to get back to and the one I’m trying to get back to aren’t the same?”

  “They probably aren’t,” he said, like it was no big deal. “In fact, I’d say it’s statistically almost impossible.”

  “Then how can we work together?”

  “Because if I’m right,” he said, “the trick to going back home is one trick. The portal is the same, but then it branches. If we find it, you go back to your world and I go back to mine.”

  “But then, I’d never see you again, right?”

  “Right,” Gordon answered soberly. “But if what I think is true, you also wouldn’t miss me.”

  “Why?” My heart clenched. We’d only just met, but he was already growing on me.

  “Once you land, you won’t remember me, or any of the other worlds, for very long. And later, maybe only in a dream, or in some funny kind of fe
eling that takes hold of you like a shiver. Like déjà vu. I’ve learned that the shiver is called interference, but that’s another story. Anyhow, when you live in one layer of the multiverse onion, you can’t see the other layers.”

  I kicked a stone across the street and gave him a squint. “So how come I can remember the world I was in yesterday?”

  “That,” he said, his voice a little Darth Vadery behind the mask. “I haven’t figured out yet. I think it’s because we’re in float mode. We’re non-local. Like when you’re on vacation with your family, you have these intense memories of every place you go. But when you get home to school and stuff, the memories fade. Right now, we’re entangled with the whole picture—we’re on vacation…but when we get back to where we started, we can only be in that one place.”

  “This doesn’t feel much like a vacation,” I said. “So far.”

  “Well,” said Gordon. “That was just an analogy. But I figure that’s how you have to look at it, or you might go nuts. When I pulled the switch the first time, all I wanted was a different life. But you know what they say: there’s no place like home.” As he said it, the Lake Michigan wind kicked up and whistled through Gordon’s mask.

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking about my old room, my old routine.

  “I guess I’d better…” He gave a vague shrug, made heavy by his leathers. “Dinner. Homework. The usual. So I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow. I hope.”

  All this was a lot for me to absorb. In fact, my head hurt. The sun was only a couple minutes from gone, and there was a sort of bluish mist curled in the air. I realized that, whoever my parents might be, they were probably worried about why I wasn’t home by now. I was still trying to make this craziness feel somehow normal. I guess that’s what they call “a coping mechanism.” But then it came to me that if I had a pitching arm, my parents might be really different.

  As I set off for “home,” I felt myself shiver. Was that the shiver that Gordon had talked about? Interference? The sort you get when you start to lose the radio station in your car because another station bleeds in? Or was it just the cool wind off Lake Michigan?