Worlds Apart

I knew it was wrong, but I did it anyway because I loved her so much. Once you've heard my story, I'll bet you'll agree that you'd have done the same thing I did.

We'd only been married a little over three years - three years, two months and thirteen days, to be precise - when my darling Anne was taken from me. She stepped off the curb without looking, and became a hit and run statistic instead of a living, breathing person. It had happened at night, as she left her office after working late, and none of the handful of people who saw it happen could ever agree on a vehicle colour, let alone produce a license plate or description of the driver. None of that mattered to me, anyway, as I stood in the coroner's viewing room and identified the love of my life through the bruising and blood.

I sleepwalked through the funeral arrangements, little realizing that even the small distraction all of that provided would be missed once it was over. As the reality of my situation crashed in on me in the weeks that followed, I retreated further and further from my friends and family. Oh, I was there physically as various well-intentioned folk would visit and try their best to console me, but my mind was filled with dead thoughts. I'd only met one woman, in thirty years, who could make me feel alive, and now she was gone. Three years of marriage, and the year we'd dated before that, as amazing as it all had been, hardly seemed fair payment for a lifetime of emptiness. As time went on, refusing to even close, let alone heal, the wound in my heart, I became increasingly bitter.

About eight weeks after she was taken from me, I lay awake in my bed in the middle of the night. I'd stopped going into work and had been put on longterm disability, so money was still coming in to pay the bills but that was about it. My mind couldn't come to grips with how I'd ever return to any semblance of a normal life, and so my thoughts that night kept slipping back to the accident. How could such a combination of unlikely events have come together to take her life away, and leave me so devastated? She didn't usually work late, but had on that particular day, because a foreign client of her office had been in the country for a visit. Unlike me, Anne was level-headed and cautious, making it so uncharacteristic for her to have stepped out into traffic carelessly. Others from her work were right there with her, and yet not one of them was able to place a restraining hand on her arm, or shout a warning, or do any little thing that would've possibly turned a deadly, full-on collision into a glancing blow. How could this be? It seemed to me that the odds against all of those improbabilities converging into a single moment were inconceivable. And yet there it was.

That line of thinking, which I couldn't shake as the hours fell by that night, lead me down the path that I'm here to describe. All I ask is that you consider yourself in my place, and be honest about what you would have done.

For me, as my downward spiral continued, there was only one logical outcome to arrive at. I started to wonder about a world where what had happended hadn't happened. Certainly I'd encountered the notion of alternate realities before, in various pieces of fiction. Whether it be Spock-with-a-beard from the old Star Trek series, or any number of science fiction novels dealing with what-if scenarios, I was familiar enough with the concept. Therefore it wasn't long before I began to consider that there might be other versions of me out there, somewhere, who hadn't lost their Anne's. I vacillated back and forth between finding the whole idea comforting - the thought, after all, of her still being alive somewhere, filled my heart with joy - and becoming even more frustrated by the unfairness of my plight, in comparison to those other me's.

Regardless of my emotional response, however, as I lay there, the seed I'd planted began to grow within me. My thoughts began to be consumed by imagining what that world would be like. I could picture that other-me, in my mind's eye. His life had been identical to mine, in every respect, right up to that night. Then, where I'd received a phone call that was to bring my world crashing down around my ears, he'd simply welcomed home his darling Anne from work, and fed her a late-evening dinner of spaghetti with meatballs - the one I'd been preparing that night had sat, unfinished, on the kitchen counter for days until my cousin had thrown it out, causing me to fly into a fit of rage and scream at her to get out of my house. Probably they'd made love that night; her, appreciative for the thoughtfulness of him having had supper ready for her; him, because he was always horny. And they'd gotten up for work the next day, and the sun that had shone hadn't mocked him at all, as it had done to me.

The more I thought about those other-two, the more details I could see. Days flew by in the world behind my eyeballs. I saw a weekend shopping trip that she'd planned, that as soon as I thought of, I realized was exactly the sort of thing my Anne would've sprung on me, if only she hadn't taken that fateful step that night. And there were the two of them, going to visit my mother and father, and it was all smiles and stupid jokes and subtle inquiries after grandchildren, not the tears and downward cast eyes that had marked my own time with my world's version of them recently.

As I continued to fastforward their lives mentally through the ensuing days, I came to a point where they were lying in bed, sleeping. I couldn't seem to imagine them beyond that, try though I might. Were children going to come for them? How would they mark their 10th wedding anniversary? What would Anne look like at 40? I'd hit a wall of some sort, and couldn't get past it. All I could see was them, in the same bed in which I rested, eyes closed and at peace with the world.

Slowly, the truth dawned on me. I was seeing them right now, at the exact same moment in time that I was at. But why? What did it mean? I wanted to see more; no, I had to see more. This was the first time in two months that Anne had felt alive to me again, and really the only time I'd felt that way, either! I knew with every fibre of my being that I had a thousand times more interest in watching the rest of their lives unfold than I had in living my own dismal existence for another day, but it seemed like even that faint hope would be denied me. I squeezed my eyes shut so hard it hurt, and tried with all my might to make the movie inside my head begin moving again.

And that's when it happened. I'm no scientist, and even if I were, I doubt I could explain the physics of that moment. Nor do I really care to try, because all that mattered to me at that moment is that I found myself lying in his place, still in the same bed but with my beloved Anne beside me! I remember that my heart stopped beating, and then a rushing sound filled my ears as it started up again. And as the scent of her body hit my nostrils, I gasped!

Anne rolled toward me and said, "Honey? What's the matter? Are you feeling OK"

Tears were welling up in my eyes, and I quite honestly feared that speaking, or even moving, would break the spell and send me plummeting back to the Hell I'd come from. But I could also sense her apprehension growing as a result of my silence, and even in the darkness of our bedroom I could make out the sudden concern on her face.

"I'm fine, sweetie," I said quietly, and braced myself against the expected splintering of this dream I'd found myself in.

"OK. I'm gonna go pee, and then I'll be right back." With that, she got up and padded softly to the ensuite, and I saw the light appear under the door after she'd closed it - ever considerate Anne, not wanting to blind me in the darkness!

When she returned to the bed a minute later, I hugged her tight and kissed her neck, and forehead, and her beautiful lips.

"Huh, somebody certainly missed me," she joked, completely unaware of the irony of her words. "I should go pee more often!"

We made passionate love a few minutes later, and then I collapsed beside her in a pile of sobs and gasps. When she reached over and wiped my brow with the back of her hand, I knew that I owed her an explanation for my inexplicable behaviour.

I decided that the full truth was so impossible that even I wasn't sure I believed it, so I opted to tell her only as much of it as I thought a reasonable person could take in. I explained that I'd just had an incredibly vivid dream, that had seemed to last for weeks - as dreams sometimes do - in which she'd been killed in a freak hit and run accident. I'd had to live through her funeral, and in the days that had followed I'd fallen deeper and deeper into depression. As she listened, with just enough serious concentration on her face to convince me that she could tell this had affected me more than most dreams, I described how I'd stopped going into work, and had shut myself off from both friends and relatives.

"That's a pretty bad dream, alright," she said, "but it was just a dream. Look at me. I'm alive! And we just had sex! You wouldn't do that with a corpse, now would you?"

I laughed, and shook my head. "But here's the kicker, Anne," I continued. "Don't ask me how, but those events in my dream: they seem more real to me right now than anything you and I have done in the past eight weeks! All of that time with you, that's what feels like a dream to me!"

She suggested that I'd probably feel better in the morning, as things always seem strange in the middle of the night. After making sure I was OK, she hugged me for a few minutes and then rolled over. Before long, I could hear her regular breathing and knew she'd already fallen back asleep.

As for me, there was no chance at all that I was going to fall asleep and risk waking up back in the world I'd come from. After awhile, I got up from the bed and went out to explore the rest of the house. Things were just as I'd seen them, as I'd watched the other-two go through their lives while I'd laid in my own cold bed. Nowhere to be seen were the heaps of take-out containers and unopened mail that littered the home I'd just left.

Presently I logged into my work e-mail system, and read all of the updates from the past few months that the other-me hadn't deleted. If I was going to head into work anytime soon - I hadn't made up my mind yet about when I'd try to pull that off - then I'd need to know what I'd missed. Already my brain was starting to adjust to the inconceivable, incredible situation in which I'd found myself an hour or so earlier. I found that I had to remind myself to take deep breaths every once in awhile, as I discovered I was almost literally holding my breath, fearful that I'd end the illusion.

By the time Anne woke up, I'd decided that I'd call into work sick that day, just to give me a full day of acclimation before I had to deal with that challenge. I was a process manager at a software company, and I worked with a very clever group of geeks. The last thing I wanted was to have people think I'd lost my memory or had a breakdown of some sort. No, actually, the last thing I wanted was to lose Anne again; but staying gainfully employed was clearly going to be important to our mutual happiness, and something I'd always taken seriously when we'd been together. So I knew I needed to somehow not look like a man who'd forgotten the last eight weeks of his life!

My first day, with Anne off to work right after our shower and breakfast, gave me ample opportunity to think about what had happened. Everything was exactly as I'd seen it in my mind's eye, right down to the new clothes Anne and the other-me had bought on their shopping weekend. Had I created this world out of my imagination, then? That didn't seem possible, for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that I knew I wasn't nearly imaginative to be able to accomplish it. The only solution that seemed even remotely capable of being true was that I'd somehow transported myself to a parallel world that had diverged from my own at the moment of my-Anne's death. How, I had no clue. If desire factored into it, then clearly I'd had the equivalent of the power of a thousand exploding suns at my disposal. But since when did wanting something ever make it real?

Eventually, I decided that I'd probably never know the answer. The important thing was, Anne was still with me, and my life had meaning again. I certainly wasn't going to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, and so I set about integrating myself back into daily life.

Anne would remark upon the change in me many times over that first week, as I heaped affection on her even beyond my traditional level. She probably assumed it was "the dream", still bothering me, and generally simply chose to enjoy the attentiveness that any woman in love would bask in. While my apprehension over this bliss turning out to be a fantasy continued to hang over my head, my appreciation for the blessing I'd been handed was boundless. This world, my world now, was filled with love and joy, and so we lived happily ever after.

Or we should have, at least. My own fears, in the end, were my undoing. Or perhaps what happened was inevitable; you'll have to judge for yourself. I certainly can't claim to have any objectivity on the subject, considering the way things worked out.

And what happened, was this: I began to believe that Anne and I were being watched. It started about a month after I'd found her again. By that point, I was quite comfortably adjusted to my new life. I was doing well at work, once again, and Anne and I were talking about starting a family. There was absolutely no reason for me to entertain dark thoughts of any sort, and yet they formed nonetheless. One night, as I lay in bed, I suddenly wondered: If I was here, in this life, where had the other-me gone whose life I'd claimed? Until that moment, such a concept had not even occurred to me. But once it did, an incredible chill ran through my body. My heart began to race as this particular train of thought thundered through my brain.

Had he and I simply changed places that fateful night? Had he woken up the next morning, only to discover the bed beside him empty? What would he have made of the sudden disarray that he'd have found the house in, along with the cards of sympathy and dead flower arrangements? How could he possibly have coped with calling around, to Anne's work, and to her parents, and to friend after friend, and at each turn being told, in compassionate but confused tones, that his beloved wife was dead, and had been for two months now? Would this other-me have gone on a rampage, believing that he was being made the victim of an impossibly-cruel prank? I, at least, had lived through the painful series of events around Anne's death, had received whatever consolation there was to be found in those first weeks, and could rail against the unfairness of it all, but not the reality. He, on the other hand, would've had none of that buffer, but simply the ice-cold shower of awakening to a world which believed that his wife was long-since dead and buried, despite the fact that he'd made love to her just the night before.

The horror of his situation washed over me that night, and filled me with first guilt, and then dread. I knew that I was responsible for his fate, that every wonderful moment I'd enjoyed over the past month had been at his expense, and the direct inverse of what he'd been enduring. But worse than that was the feeling that, by making this connection, I'd possibly provided the means by which he could get his own life back. After all, if the depths of my own misery had been sufficient to allow me to supplant him all those weeks ago, how much greater was his personal Hell now, in comparison? And whereas I had unknowingly stumbled upon the notion of parallel universes as a means of dealing with my grief, he had every reason to believe in just such a thing, having been ousted from one to another! Surely he must've realized what had transpired by now, and was working day and night to figure out how to reclaim his life that I'd stolen!

Needless to say, I didn't get any sleep that night. Anne noticed the downturn in my mood that next morning, but of course there was no way I could confide in her the reason for it. Over the course of that long night of sleeplessness, I'd begun to believe that the other-me was already observing us, just as I'd done, in his place. I wouldn't have told Anne anything regardless - what could she possibly have made of such an insane tale, not to mention that I would've risked her recoiling from me as the intruder I was, if she had believed it! But with the chance of his eyes now being fixed upon us, any such confession was doubly out of the question as I certainly didn't want to confirm his suspicions. Instead, I kept my dark secret to myself, and guided my behaviour as would any man who believed his every move were being monitored by his mortal enemy.

I resolved not to sleep, if at all possible, because it had been while the other-me had been just so defenseless that I'd made my crossing over. For all I knew, that was a key characteristic of the event. Perhaps staying awake was all it took to fend off any such attack. Naturally, I discovered I couldn't really avoid sleep entirely, but I did manage to catch my rest in short, fitful snatches during which I kept the proverbial one eye open. I found that even a few 20-minute naps over the course of the night were enough to allow me to operate for the rest of the day, albeit somewhat zombie-like at times.

As the days went by, I could sense the other-me watching me, more and more. His hatred of me grew to the point where I could feel it, palpably, through the connection between us. Because of this, I found that any guilt I'd felt previously was gone now, replaced by the overwhelming desire to keep him at bay. I knew that I'd taken what was rightfully his, but it was mine now, and there was no way I was going to let him steal it back.

At some point during this period, I lost my job. Apparently my work had suffered of late, they said, and my behaviour was described as paranoid. That turn of events barely registered on me, though, between the deathly fatigue I was feeling and the arguments I'd been having with Anne. She couldn't understand why I refused to make love to her anymore - how could I, with him watching? - nor why I wouldn't tell her what was bothering me. I could feel everything slipping away from me, but it didn't seem as real of a threat to me, then, as the other-me did. There was also, I'm ashamed to admit, a small part of me that regarded the deterioration of my life somewhat happily, knowing that, were he ever to succeed in replacing me, he'd be coming back to just as much misery as he'd left.

This latter notion grew and grew within me, with each new day. I felt as though I were slowly losing the battle against the one I'd replaced, and that he was soon going to swap us back to our original worlds, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. This thought eventually turned to conviction, and that conviction lead me to act as I did.

I can't say whether it was desire to keep him from having the happiness I felt was intended for me alone, or a protective instinct toward Anne and the thought of her suffering unimaginable indignities at his evil hand. Regardless, it was clear to me that the only way out of the situation was to kill Anne, and so I did. I smothered her while she slept, knowing that he was watching, and that finally there'd be no reason for him to ever return to this world. And sure enough, the moment that the death rattle sounded in her soft, white throat, I felt the relief I'd longed for wash over me. I slept that night as I hadn't slept in weeks.

When they arrested me for Anne's murder, I decided to tell the whole story. I didn't really care if they believed me or not; I was simply tired of keeping the truth to myself. The shrink who examined me listened attentively to all of it, and even asked many questions that showed she was following it all. Despite that promising sign, though, the report she filed on me was disappointingly lacking in insight. Unable to grasp the enormity of it, I suppose, she concluded that I'd harbored an insane desire to kill my wife for months, but had kept it below my conscious mind. As a result, she speculated, I'd manufactured a fantasy in which Anne had died and I'd been subjected to weeks of depression before escaping through the science fiction of a trip to a parallel universe. Her theory was that this was my mind making one last ditch attempt to avert the violence, by making me deal with the pain of her loss as a cautionary tale, as it were. But that proved unsuccessful, she concluded, based on the fact that the murder still sadly came about. Quite the interesting case study, blah blah blah.

I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything different. My story's no easy thing to take in, I realize. I would hope that you'll never have to face the types of decisions that I wrestled with, but if you do, I suspect you'll do just as I did. After all, it's not like I feel that I had a lot of choice in the matter. These things just happen.