The Multitude, стр. 26
Carla tried to turn right…and her body went left. She wanted to back away from the stairs, but her body plunged forward. Hope flat-lined into despair, and defeat signaled its triumph by shoving a cloud across the sun, shadowing the scene into a more appropriate nightmare scenario.
As if trapped in someone else’s head, she stared out the eyeholes but had no control over the reflexes. Her zombie body took a step down on its own, followed by another, again and again, bent to the task of reaching the station below. The street noise diminished, replaced by the deafening roar of a subway train in the tunnel. Always such a racket! In the suicide dream, she never escaped it.
She reached the gate, dropped a token into the slot, and passed through to a shorter flight of stairs down to the platform. Dampness chilled her bones. The station’s grime brought to mind a bat cave littered with scattered patches of human guano—cigarette butts, spit, wrappers, and a few unidentified, oily-looking spots.
Presuming the pattern in earlier renditions still held, she did have choices. Each dream had minor variations. She could pause on a bench if she wanted, but a gum-chewing jerk in a hooded sweatshirt usually sat beside her, invading her space by leaning too close.
Instead, she selected the straightforward script and stepped up to the edge of the platform, beyond the yellow safety line. She looked down at the cold steel rails of track, then across to the same billboard ads she’d seen dozens of times—perfume, clothing, shows. Those encased in plastic were cracked, the ones papered onto the wall were peeling, and all had been tagged by street artists who somehow got away with it, despite the threat of an occasional transit police patrol and the seemingly constant presence of waiting passengers.
A high-pitched screech signaled the approach of a train from within the dark recesses of the tunnel. Carla would have slumped her shoulders if she could, resigned as she was to her doom.
Someone’s shadow approached from behind. A man.
“I don’t understand why you’d stand so close to the track,” he shouted. “You told me you wouldn’t.” He settled a hand on her shoulder with a gentle, familiar touch.
He soothed her. He was someone she loved. But for the life of her, and her life was at stake, she couldn’t remember who he was.
“Do you think I have a choice?” she asked.
He slid his hand down to grip her forearm. “I hoped you did.”
The line of an oft-repeated script rose to the surface. She tightened her lips to prevent the words from escaping.
“Let’s go,” he said.
She clenched her teeth but couldn’t prevent the death sentence from vomiting out of her mouth. “I want you to push me in front of the train.”
“You’re talking crazy, Carla.”
Yes, crazy. She screamed to erase her words, but the deafening train drowned her cry. Its lead car burst out of the tunnel and into the station with a grinning skull tagged to its front window by an underground artist with amazing talent.
The man tugged her arm toward safety.
Carla couldn’t stop herself from twisting out of his grasp, losing her balance, and falling to the tracks. The train leapt up to her in an instant, its horn blaring, and its brakes showering the platform with sparks.
And then…
The smell of forest, earth, and grazing animals, the blinding sunlight, and the white noise of crickets ushered Carla into another world entirely. Back on her feet, heart racing, breath coming in gasps, she revolved in a slow half circle, sweeping her gaze from forest to glen to her thatch-roofed cottage before sinking to her knees. Her crossbow fell from her hands.
Once again, death in the subway served as a portal from one dream to the next. Hadn’t it? If not, what just happened? Perhaps a wormhole in the cosmos allowed her to exist in more than one reality at the same time. That idea had great appeal over the more likely possibility. She was a crazy woman, a schizophrenic, a mishmash of personalities competing for a single body—the Carla who ran Rag Thyme in Syracuse, the Carla who asked a familiar but anonymous man to help her commit suicide in a New York City subway station, and this Carla who lived in a place known as Sanctimonia, where she guarded the far boundary of her village grounds against raiders.
No, not Carla. Her name was Maynya in this place.
Collectively delusional? She couldn’t discount the possibility each of her personalities imagined their surroundings, creating scenes and then thinking them real, including another Carla who traveled hundreds of miles in her sleep only to awaken in her own bed and find physical proof of the journey—a man’s business card impossibly in her hand. A card she might have hallucinated, too. After all, where was it now, at this moment?
A hare bounded out of the woods, raced across the meadow, and entered the forest on the other side. Each of her worlds had unique rules of order. In Sanctimonia, new things happened. Every episode followed a chronological path, always picking up where the last left off—she could remember walking out of her cabin earlier to stand in the meadow—and the randomness of events prevented her from guessing the future. But the subway nightmare chased its own tail, returning to the same beginning, then building to the identical climax each time, with only minor variations in between.
And what about free will—something she possessed in Sanctimonia but not in Manhattan? Did she follow a script in Syracuse, too? She