People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.
And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated - for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.
And after that? I asked her.
A lot of darkness, she said.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down. A body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
These are facts you find out later, though.
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, aspin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can't be discounted.
Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
The Taxi
"You have a pimple," said the doctor.
I'd hoped nobody would notice.
"You've been picking it," he went on.
When I'd woken that morning - early, so as to get to this appointment - the pimple had reached the stage of hard expectancy in which it begs to be picked. It was yearning for release. Freeing it from its little white dome, pressing until the blood ran, I felt a sense of accomplishment: I'd done all that could be done for this pimple.
"You've been picking at yourself," the doctor said.
I nodded. He was going to keep talking about it until I agreed with him, so I nodded.
"Have a boyfriend?" he asked.
I nodded to this too.
'Trouble with the boyfriend?" It wasn't a question, actually he was already nodding for me. "Picking at yourself," he repeated. He popped out from behind his desk and lunged toward me. He was a taut fat man, tight-bellied and dark.
"You need a rest," he announced.
I did need a rest, particularly since I'd gotten up so early that morning in order to see this doctor, who lived out in the suburbs. I'd changed trains twice. And I would have to retrace my steps to get to my job. Just thinking of it made me tired.
"Don't you think?" He was still standing in front of me. "Don't you think you need a rest?
"Yes," I said.
He strode off to the adjacent room, where I could hear him talking on the phone.
I have thought often of the next ten minutes - my last ten minutes. I had the impulse, once, to get up and leave through the door I'd entered, to walk the several blocks to the trolley stop and wait for the train that would take me back to my troublesome boyfriend, my job at the kitchen store. But I was too tired.
One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.
In her most accomplished novel, Barbara Kingsolver takes us on an epic journey from the Mexico City of artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to the America of Pearl Harbor, FDR, and J. Edgar Hoover. The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their...
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.
Like Robin Hood, Zorro is a story that almost everyone knows, but few have read. The original book by Johnston McCulley is out of print and ...
read more
I'm 13 years old and my teacher handed me this book and told me to read and do a report on it. I looked at the cover, saw the title (which made no ...
read more
I'm 13 years old and my teacher handed me this book and told me to read and do a report on it. I looked at the cover, saw the title (which made no ...
read more
The 2009 National Book Award Winners(Nov 19 2009) The winners of the 2009 National Book Awards have been announced at the National Book Foundation's 60th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit...
Full Story
Google Settlement Filed(Nov 13 2009) After two delays, attorneys for the AAP, Authors Guild and Google filed an amended settlement agreement today in an effort to end litigation brought by the...
Full Story
Become a member!
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends only the most interesting and well written books and provides you with everything you need to decide which are
right for you - so you can browse the best and ignore the rest.
One Month Free Trial