Part 3

The hallway is as dark as it ever is, and Nico stares down it and tries not to go cross-eyed.

"So," he says, "they’re all doors to your house?"

"Mostly," I say, "but not all." I explain: one that I found once led to an inexplicable doorway standing in the middle of a mangrove bog, and another opened up to a perfectly blue room full of miniature skyscrapers. "But most of them lead to the house, yes, with its own versions of me. And very likely you."

"Isn’t this like home invasion?"

"A little, I admit, but very few alternate universes extradite, and I haven’t found very many versions of me who haven’t at least started to figure it out."

"That’s cool," he says.

His eyes dart from door to door, eying them like potential prizes. He finally walks a few yards in and picks a door on the left, opens it to reveal the same landing on the third floor. His face sags a little like the me who didn’t have her shit together.

"It’s the same."

"Probably, mostly. But not exactly."

"That’s kind of anticlimactic," he says.

I agree.

"Is there an end to the hallway?"

"I don’t know." I explain about the walking and the running and the bicycling. He asks to see the garage and smiles in the same way that a shark would smile if they had lips. Espie’s smile, and the sight of it makes me feel six again, and mischievous. I take him down there and he starts rummaging, moving with purpose. He gathers up things—a hot glue gun, pots, paint-sticks and old boxes. While he packs, he asks questions.

"Have you ever tried post-it notes?"

I have; they go missing in about ten minutes, even if you paste them right on the door with superglue.

"Defacing the doors?" he asks as he eyes a can of spray-paint.

Tried it, it never sticks.

I say these things, like tried that or doesn’t work but he just smiles and that makes me smile the way that his mom used to, when she wasn’t being a bitch of the worst sort. She practiced at being a bitch the way most girls practiced the oboe.
He leads the way back up the stairs, taking them two at a time and I follow, beaming, with a box full of things in my arms. I set it down on the landing and he rips the sides of one of the boxes carefully, making a rough brown square. On his knees now, he pivots back and forth, writing with a paint-stick in careful block letters—

DOOR 1
AUNT CATHY’S HOUSE
YEAR – 2010

"You think some of the other places are in other times," I ask.

"It’s possible," he says.

GRAVITY 1.0

"You’re going to measure the gravity?"

"We can eyeball it."

IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM

"Well," I say, "there are some wolves in the woods around here, sometimes."

He corrects himself.

IMMEDIATE DANGERS: BOREDOM AND INFREQUENT WOLVES

He breaks another piece of box down and then glues it to the back of the makeshift poster, and the kid’s got a standee ready—a little rickety but nice enough.

"It’s probably going to disappear if you leave it in the hallway," I say.

"Then we’ll just leave it right here."

He props it up right on the landing and reaches into the box for a screwdriver and starts taking the door right off its hinges, standing on his tiptoes to reach the top screws.

"Just in case the hallway tries to close it," he says.

There’s a me in the hallway when we walk into it, and she waves us over.

"You look just like my nephew!" she says.

"I am your nephew," he says. "Kind of. Can I take your door off its hinges?"

"Woah champ," she says, "no need to be so forward."

She’s joking, of course, and I can tell because it’s the kind of joke I would make, but not the sort I’d ever really go through with saying out loud. Nico doesn’t get it, probably because my bitch-sister sheltered him to an absurd degree and gave him books to read about pheromones and bees and flat-earth theory. I set a hand on his shoulder and can’t help but think that it’s sad when a kid thinks that sex is the genital-based exchange of reproductive materials.

He explains his idea and the other me gives a pleasant sort of shrug. Nico tiptoes up again, at the hinges quick as a cricket, and I grab some more cardboard from my house, the real house, and a paint stick.

"So tell us, he asks, what’s the gravity like in your universe?"

*

He’s up on the third floor already. I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my robe with my fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee. I start to worry that I’ve given him an obsession to replace depression, and really that’s not much better to begin with, but I’ll admit it—I’m fucking curious, and he’s found some interesting me’s, and couple of interesting him’s to boot. One of them tags along on all his expeditions now—they tie the end of a fishing line around the third floor railing of that other-Nico’s house and just unwind it as they go. Sometimes the door moves, slides like they’re wont to do, but as long as they don’t close any doors behind themselves, the line holds just fine. Nico talks to me every night at dinner, loud and excitable theories about the hallway. It’s not the nature of it that really gets him, so much as the mechanics. I suppose we’re opposites that way—when he figures out that the doors always slide once every six hours and never move more than ten spaces up or down, I can’t revel in the meaning of that without wondering why it works that way.

"You know that you’re going to have to start school soon," I say to him at dinner.

He fiddles with his porkchop.

"Discover anything interesting today?"

He smiles, doesn’t want to say anything as payback for bringing up school at all, but he can’t help himself in the end.

"We found a version of the house that’s abandoned for miles around, nothing but fields of wildflowers and grain."

"Strange," I say, and hold my tongue for a second before finally letting go. "You two have been leaving the house, then?"

"Just the once," he says. He knows that he’s caught, but I’ve avoided the matter for long enough that neither of us feels the need to really get into it. It’s all absurdity anyway, the fucking hallway, and whether I draw the boundary for him at the doorstep of another me’s house or miles away from it, it’s all still just as potentially dangerous.

I don’t say anything else, and we eat our porkchops in uneasy silence.