The Parallel Universe Finder

Sleep does not come willingly. It’s a fight against an opponent who does not weaken, and who does not feel the strain of stamina. It’s an opponent which I no longer step into the ring with. Laura snores softly beside me, her body facing the opposite direction. Some evenings, the poison of midnight conversations with myself, can drive me to near lunacy. It’s a world that I should not be a part of. It’s a world that should be fast forwarded while I’m deep in the trenches of REM sleep. There are monsters that live in this darkness. Not the type of monsters that you see in horror movies but the type that have no solid foundation. The type that softly echoes all of the things that you avoid during the day because there are a million things to do. At night, all you can do is sleep, or think.

I decide at 2am, to swing my legs off the side of the bed and sit upright for a moment. Then I get up and open the door slowly as the hinges creak noisily. But Laura is undisturbed, she’s a traveler, a thousand miles away. I close the door behind me and look in on the kids. They’re sleeping peacefully and I wonder what they’re dreaming about. What I’d give to slide right inside their heads and breathe in the fantasy of childhood wonder. The places they can imagine, where all is well, and the heroes always prevail.

Downstairs I open the fridge and take out a carton of milk and then pour it into a glass with a thin crack spreading down the center like varicose veins. I take a drink, and wonder why I decided to have a glass of milk. I never drink milk.

I take out my phone and begin mindlessly scrolling, hoping that by the time I look up from it, the sun will be rising, I’ll make a cup of coffee and a sense of normalcy will return. As usual, I feel that my phone is reading my mind. Because I’m thinking about parallel universes. The theory that out there in the vastness of space, there’s another me. But he isn’t sitting in the kitchen, drinking milk, and wondering how much longer his marriage is going to last, and why he can’t beat this depression. He’s happy, and sure of himself. I laugh at that idea.

Then on my phone, I see an ad for an app. The Parallel Universe Finder. All you need to do is download it, enter some of your personal information, and it’ll show you what the other versions of yourself are up to.

I go to the app store and download it. I don’t know why, other than I’m an insomniac with hours to kill, and it was a thought that was running through my mind anyway. Is this the best version of me? Or were there other versions that took opposite paths on those many forks in the road?

A screen pops up. It’s a pretty shade of orange and it tells me to enter my address. I do. Then it tells me to take a picture of myself. I sigh, but I oblige. Then it shows the top of my house like on Google Maps and then quickly it pans out. Then I can see the entire world, and then the solar system and it keeps going faster and faster, until a giant light seemingly leaps out of the phone, and I drop it.

“Ow!” I say, rubbing my eyes with the palm of my hands. What on earth was that?

I grab my phone from the floor and the tiles are different. They look like the tiles that Laura and I looked at the hardware store. Something we used to do when we were broke and bored. A way to pretend that we were of a higher class than we were. We liked to wrap our arms around each other and point at the different tiles, or go through the paint and each grab a sheet of colors, and talk about painting the exterior of a house that we didn’t own.

This was the Forest Valley flooring. I knew it. I rubbed my hands across it. It glistened unlike our tiles which were cracked and separated, an ugly brown crack filler lazily filling in the gaps. But that was gone. For a moment, I thought that I did fall asleep, but if so, this was the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I could smell new paint and hardwood, mixed with some kind of exotic fragrance.

I walked into the spare room where I had a tiny music setup in the far left corner, with an old beat up guitar hanging from a wall mount just above the turntable. But above the turntable was a dozen guitars hanging in perfect unison above a thousand vinyl records in hardwood crates like at an Indie record store.

On the far wall above a 60 inch TV was a line of gold and platinum records with my name on the bottom. “I’m a rockstar.” I said. “Fuck me, I’m a rockstar.”

I stared in awe at the man cave of my dreams and then decided to take a look upstairs. The stairs were beautiful, and the railing was something out of an early 20th century mansion. The kind that Shirley Temple would be tap dancing in. The hall upstairs was three times as long, and five or six times as wide with strange Art Deco shapes crawling along the walls like an invasive species of plant. I rubbed my hands along the walls, and I could hear giggling coming from the first room on the right.

Inside were two beautiful blonde women, laughing, drinking tall glasses of bubbly champagne and snorting white powder off of a piece of broken glass. They both looked up at me with white circles on the tip of their noses. “Tysooonnnnnnnnnn” They called out together, and continued laughing.

“Where have you been, baby? You said you were only going to be gone for just a whittle minute.” One of them said, mimicking a baby with pouting lips, while holding her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “But you lied, mister. And you need to get punished.”

Without having any control over my body, I feel myself almost gliding towards this king sized bed shaped like a sphere with silk sheets the color of an Ancient Roman toga. I fall face first into the mattress and the girls corrall my body within an instant. They kiss my cheeks, then my lips, then each other. Then they put the piece of small glass in front of my face, and before I know it the powder is in my nose, then coursing through my system. Then the champagne, and more powder. The world is spinning off its axis, and I think I'm going to be sick.

I lean over the bed to throw up my guts, but nothing comes out. Then I look up into a life size mirror. Something tall and strange like you’d see at the carnival. Faces and bodies distorted, and all I could see was a mane of dirty blonde hair crawling down bumble bee sunglassed eyes, like I was the male version of Jackie O. My arms are like a connect the dots, leading me to believe that I was battling serious substance abuse issues.

“Where’s Laura?” I ask.

“Who?” The girls say in unison. Laughing.

“Laura. My wife.” They laugh again. “What’s fo fucking funny? Where’s my wife? My wife?”

“You were never married, hun. Said it wasn’t for you.”

“What?”

“You had a girl, baby. But she got pregnant. Don’t you remember? You told us the story a hundred times. You were drinking and playing guitar, getting ready for a show. Your girl said she needed to talk to you and said she was pregnant. You told her to take a hike. You had no interest in raising kids, remember?”

“I, uh, don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, hunny, don’t act like you did the wrong thing. Look at this palace. Look at us.” They started to kiss again. “You don’t need anyone holding you back, baby. You created this all on your own.”

“I, uh, I need to get my phone.”

I walk back downstairs, the world around me going in and out of focus as the drugs take over my system.

In the kitchen I find my phone sitting on the floor. I scroll through and look for the app. I can’t find it. After a few minutes, there’s a pop-up that says, “Do you want to return?” I click “Yes” then it says, “Are you sure?” and I click “Yes,” then it says, “Are you really sure, Tyson?” “Yes” “Okay. Just a reminder that in the other world you’re an insomniac bordering on depression. Who works at 9-5 and has a marriage that’s dissolving like skin in battery acid. Here? Sure. You have a little drug problem, but that’s part of the excess. You made it. You won. So, I’ll ask again. Are you sure?

And for a moment, I hesitate. I’m not happy. I’m drowning, but maybe I’m drowning for good reason. Maybe, what I think is drowning is actually just responsibility rearing its head and telling me that I need to be a good father and a good husband. Telling me that I need to slow down with the drinking and nightly self-deprecating ritual that I take part in. That without the responsibility, I could have done something, maybe, but it would have come at a cost.

My thumb hovers above the phone and I click yes.

The light hits me again and I’m back in my middle class home, my fingers on the floor placed right in the crack filler. The glass of milk with the crack, shattered to my right. It was time, I suppose. It was time.

I check for the app but it’s gone and when I search for it, there’s nothing.

I walk to the man cave and it’s the middle class one again with the barely functioning turntable, a small milk crate of records, and my old man’s beat up Fender hanging crooked on a cheap plastic wall mount. But it seems better now. I feel better, like I could sleep for a fortnight.

Is Laura upstairs? I ask myself and I drag myself feeling nervous about this fever dream. Feeling like I might have had a psychotic episode and I’m actually in a straight jacket in a padded cell somewhere banging my head against the cushion and laughing. Laughing like the blondes.

But when I reach the top of the stairs the Art Deco is gone and replaced with an old stained white color that’s peeling and in dire need of an upgrade. Then I peek my head into Laura’s room and there’s a body there, sleeping with her face against the opposite wall. I walk over to her side of the bed, and see her mouth slightly ajar, with a little bubble of drool coming out, and yup, it’s Laura.

The kids' rooms are both occupied with my children and then I decide to lay my head on the pillow.

Sleep is coming, I can feel it. I don’t fight it. I smile, but for a moment before sleep takes me, I hear Laura’s snoring and think.

“I could have been somebody.”

And then I fall asleep.