'I know it seems like such a cliché,' says Brooklynite Herb Tillerman, 'you know, like when Xers and Millennials talk about 9/11, but I really do remember the sky that day. It was beautiful. Like Lynch used to say in those videos,' his voice half-cracking, Tillerman attempts an impression of the late film director, who perished, along with millions of other inhabitants of the West Coast, in the freak atmospheric event, commonly now called the FAE, which seems to have preceded what happened elsewhere on that day, but trails off into silence before he can finish.
Herb's friend John Graf takes up the story: 'Yeah, it was blue alright, but I wouldn't say it was, like...when people talk about 9/11 they make the sky sound innocent. But even before it happened, it felt...weird. Stretched. It was like a balloon just before it pops. I mean not all the time, not like from sunrise but just before...'
'Before it.' Tillerman chimes back in. 'Yeah, maybe that was the FAE or something, man. I remember there was a...sound. Well not a sound but...'
'A thunder without sound, is how I describe it,' says CUNY Professor and poet Gwen Charleston, when I meet her later that day in the prefab classroom where she, as she puts it 'continues to attempt teaching' a year after the event which upended how so many of us see the world and our place in it. 'Of course that's a paradox, but that's what I'm trying to describe. A sound which is not a sound. We all heard it. Everyone in the city. Everyone in the country. We were all together in that one moment, hearing it, that soundless sound. And then...do you know what I remember most about it? The trains.'
This was something Tillerman and Graf had mentioned to me as they sat by the rubble-strewn wreckage of the Gowanus Canal, clutching their enamel mugs of government coffee. 'Yeah, the trains, man.' Herb shook his head. That was unreal. You could see them, like they were in a diagram or something. And...I dunno if this happened to you, bro...'
Graf nodded agreement. 'It seemed like forever we just looked at them. Like they were models, chugging around a toy store track. For a second, it was just like this...a fucking MIRACLE in the sky, man, and then...'
Again, Tillerman picks up the thread while his friend trails off into silence. 'And then it weren't no fuckin' miracle,' he mutters.
* * *
'What is a miracle?' The voice of MIT's Acting Head of Physics, Barry Barenboim, crackles down the phone line, and I find it impossible not to picture him standing in a lecture hall. 'One very good definition might be that a miracle is something we have never seen happen before. And by that yardstick, however terrible its effects, then, yes, the event of Election Day 2024 was, certainly, a miracle. The question that faces us now, though, is to work out the meaning of that miracle. What does it tell us, this impossible catastrophe, about the world, the universe, the - God, I wish this word had not been cheapened so by a dozen childish movies in the years before what happened, but - the multiverse that we inhabit?' He pauses; in the silence I picture him adjusting his glasses. 'My fear is that it tells us nothing good.'
'We can say, with some certainty, that parallel universes exist. That much is proven by the historical documents we have found from the Other America. Not to mention the numerous instances of, well...instances. Which have had their own bizarre psychological effects...'
'Instance' is one of many words which have taken on new meaning in the year since November 2024, the term we now use to describe people who find themselves inhabiting the same country as their otherworld counterpart. Such people are rarer than the popular imagination would suppose, but at the same time more prevalent than pure statistics would suggest. Some people have found themselves looking at, talking to, interacting with, a perfect copy of themselves; others, like the celebrated Cyruses, have found that gender does not stay consistent across universes. The effects of this phenomenon on the psyche have yet to be fully explored, as Doctor Aarya Begum explained to me: 'You are talking about people who have spent their lives existing in a culture which tells us we are unique, suddenly encountering a living, breathing - or in some very traumatic cases, an unliving, unbreathing - carbon copy of themselves. We simply do not have a psychological model to describe this! If someone came into my office on the 4th of November last year and told me they had met their doppelganger I would have had no hesitation in calling them delusional. But now for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people in this country - I mean are we even one country anymore? - in these countries which now occupy the same land mass...this is a daily reality. A daily insanity! I'm sorry...I understand you've talked to Professor Barenboim. He can give you the physics, but...Look, let me tell you something, okay? When I was a child I had a horrifying, vivid nightmare in which I found my own dead body. I had that nightmare once, as a child, and I've never forgotten it. And now I have it every night! And in the daytime too! I live in terror that one day there will be a knock on my door and I will be called to some morgue to identify a body that looks, to all intents and purposes, like myself. I do not say this because I want your sympathy. I say it because I want you to understand how the phenomenon of instantiation has made even the self-concept of so-far uninstanced individuals much less secure. We are dealing with a pschological crisis we have never seen before.'
This is, I'm sure you'll agree, heavy stuff. And it has always been my instinct to try and cope with heavy stuff through humour. That's been useful to me more than once in getting answers out of people, but in retrospect it probably wasn't smart to try and lighten the mood by asking Dr Begum that question about the Cyruses. 'I have no idea and I don't care to think about it. Go ask a lawyer, if you're that bothered, whether it would be incest or masturbation, and whether it's defamation while you're at it.' Reader, I'm ashamed to say I didn't follow up on Dr Begum's advice - after all, lawyers are busier than ever these days. Just look at Musk v Musk.
In all seriousness, though, the doctor was right to criticise my levity. These are not light-hearted times, whatever the ramifications of that fateful day for celebrity gossip. Perhaps no-one better summed that fact up than Professor Barenboim, who is worth quoting at some length:
'More than one work of speculative fiction has dealt with the possibility of two separate geographic entities existing, through some dimensional sleight-of-hand, in the same physical space. In most of these stories the unit chosen has been a city, and it's easy to see why. The city is an understandable human unit. And why wouldn't it be? We are literally civilised people - our minds have been formed by centuries of living in cities. The mind might be wider than the sky, but our fantasies are city-sized: the memory most people have of the event is one of looking up and seeing a duplicate of their city in that fatal sky.
'But that experience was duplicated in every city across this nation, and every town too. If Thoreau were at Walden Pond today he would have seen his hut hover above him. If an isolated group of people were walking the great plains of Kansas they would have seen floating substrate from below. I still don't know how some parts of the country weren't destroyed when the Minuteman warheads hit the dirt - near as we can tell, that must have been something to do with the FAE. So the event was terrifying, first of all, simply because of its scale.
'It was, of course, also terrifying because this Other America was, very slightly, not coterminous with our own. It did not share the space we shared (It also seems, from the documents and instance interviews, that it also had not advanced to the same point in history, but as fascinating as the implications of that may be it need not concern us now). It manifested roughly 10,000 feet above us, phasing into our world from whichever one it came from. At which point, like all other things in our world, it became subject to gravity. All the horror that we have experienced flows from that simple fact.
'But even that isn't the thing that worries me the most. You see, miracles only happen once. Not because they never happen again, in fact for the opposite reason - once something has happened, you can almost guarantee it will happen again, somehow. Miracle becomes mere phenomenon, and phenomena are repeatable.
'What terrifies me most is this: when this happens again, whatever part of this other or some other other world flashes into our own could do so in the exact same space its counterpart occupies. And if that happens, all the carnage we have seen will seem as comparatively minor as that Tuesday in September a quarter of a century ago.'
Poets, psychologists, physicists, drifters, grifters, celebrities, and more: we are all of us coming to terms with a new reality, the implications of which are deeply disturbing. But there's one thing I still wonder about, and it's this: right now, somewhere in this multiverse, there is an Earth that, a year ago, completely lost America.
What's happening there?
