A Thousand Pieces of You

I hate this. I’d rather go home, throw up, and pass out, preferably in that order.

But every time I look out at the dark, jagged, futuristic London in front of me, I remember that Paul is here. I remember that we have to meet again, and what I have to do when that happens. There’s no way out—not for him, and not for me.

Paul would say it was our destiny.

“What are you trying to do?” Theo said one time, glaring across the table at Paul. The pieces that would become the very first Firebird prototype were strewn between them, across the rainbow table. “The minute Sophia gets vindicated, you want to turn her into a laughingstock again?”

“What do you mean?” I demanded. I’d come in from piano lessons, and I quickly ditched my sheet music so I’d look less like a kid. Theo is only three and a half years older than me, Paul only two; they were the first of the grad students I’d ever thought of as being more like me than like my parents. I wanted them to think of me the same way. “Why would people be laughing at Mom?”

Paul’s gray eyes glanced up to meet mine for only one second before he went back to his work. “It’s not her theory. It’s mine. I take responsibility.”

Theo leaned back in his chair as he gestured toward Paul with his thumb. “This one is ready to risk his scientific credibility—and his adviser’s, no matter what he says—by arguing that destiny is real.”

“Destiny?” That sounded weirdly . . . romantic from a guy like Paul.

“There are patterns within the dimensions,” Paul insisted, never looking up again. “Mathematical parallels. It’s plausible to hypothesize that these patterns will be reflected in events and people in each dimension. That people who have met in one quantum reality will be likely to meet in another. Certain things that happen will happen over and over, in different ways, but more often than you could explain by chance alone.”

“In other words,” I said, “you’re trying to prove the existence of fate.”

I was joking, but Paul nodded slowly, like I’d said something intelligent. “Yes. That’s it exactly.”

“You should come to Paris with me next week,” Romola shouts over the dance music in the club. I think it’s the same one I was standing outside last night, when I arrived in this dimension.

“Sure!” Why not accept? She’ll never actually take me; I’ll never actually go; and we both know it. “That would be amazing!”

I’m wearing a dress she loaned me: dull pewter leather, skin-tight even on my rail-thin frame. It couldn’t be more obvious that my breasts are practically nonexistent, but I’m also showing off a whole lot of leg, and in the opinion of the guys in this club, that makes up for the lack of cleavage. They’re all over me, buying me drinks—more drinks I don’t need.

And I hate the way they look at me, admiring but appraising, the same kind of hard, greedy assessment they’d give an expensive sports car. Not one of them sees me.

“Probably you think it’s impractical at least,” I said to Paul, that one night he watched me paint. “Art.”

“I don’t know that practicality is the most important thing.”

Which sounded almost like a compliment, for a moment, until I realized that he basically had admitted that he thought it was impractical of me to study painting at college. I was going to take classes in art restoration so I wouldn’t wind up living in Mom and Dad’s basement when I was thirty, but I didn’t feel like defending myself to him. I felt like going on the attack.

It was late November, just after Thanksgiving—only a week and a half ago, and yet already it seems like another lifetime. The evening was surprisingly warm, the last glow of Indian summer—or “Old Ladies’ Summer,” the Russian phrase my mother prefers. I wore an old camisole smeared with a hundred shades of paint from past evenings of work, and blue jean shorts that I’d cut off myself. Paul stood in the doorway of my bedroom, the only time he’d ever come so close to intruding on my space.

I was so aware of him. He’s bigger than your average guy, and way bigger than your average physics grad student: tall, broad-shouldered, and extremely muscular—from the rock climbing, I guess. Paul’s frame seemed to fill the entire door. Although I kept working, rarely looking away from my brush and canvas, it was as if I could sense him behind me. It was like feeling the warmth of a fire even when you’re not looking directly at the flame.

“Okay, maybe portraits don’t rule the art world anymore,” I said. Other students at art shows did collages and mobiles with “found objects,” Photoshopped 1960s ads to make postmodern comments on today’s society, stuff like that. Sometimes I felt out of step, because all I had to offer were my oil paintings of people’s faces. “But plenty of artists earn good money painting portraits. Ten thousand bucks apiece, sometimes, once you have a reputation. I could do that.”

“No,” Paul said. “I don’t think you could.”

I turned to him then. My parents might worship the guy, but that didn’t mean he could wander into my room and be insulting. “Excuse me?”

“I meant—” He hesitated. Obviously he knew he’d said the wrong thing; just as obviously, he didn’t understand why. “The people who get their portraits painted—rich people—they want to look good.”

“If you’re trying to dig yourself out of a hole, you’re doing a crappy job of it. Just FYI.”