Robert hears the rescue team coming down the stairwell before they call out. He doesn’t bother to answer. He’s busy watching sixteen ants march across a piss stain of his own making.

The storm of reflective vests that enter give him a headache. He nods when they undo the cuffs because it feels like the polite response. Thanks for the rescue four weeks and fourteen minutes too late. Did you not smell the inter-dimensional particles in the pink rain earlier? He’s already gone.

Robert watches the agent who peels the sheets off, tracking the audible swallow as his eyes blink and then widen. It’s going to suck seeing that same expression on Chris.

He thinks of Chris and spits sick over the side of the bed.

Earth 12 Chris is the least popular brand of iced tea at the supermarket. He stays in the back of the aisle alongside a misplaced pack of trail mix. Even when the shelves get restocked, these two items are never moved. There’s a silver lace cobweb dangling off the right corner of the iced tea carton and draped across the front lettering of the trail mix pack. Eventually the trail mix pack is bitten and torn apart, by mice probably, but no one takes the empty husk of packaging away.

The lab director is pacing the hospital room as he talks. Robert ignores him in favor of watching the needle enter his vein as the nurse changes the IV drip. He’s not going to answer any questions, especially not ones like describe who did this to you, not with Chris sitting here, though Chris probably already knows.

The director explains that Chris was among the few who were temporarily displaced during the portal accident. Adrift but unharmed. For them, the past four weeks have been akin to a fifteen-minute blackout. Robert is the only one patterned with bruises painted by an Alternate who looked exactly like the person sitting beside him.

“Tell me to leave,” Chris whispers, head in his hands. “I’ll do whatever you want, just—tell me.”

Chris always said Robert was the smarter of the two. Your gorgeous crazy incredible brain. He’s overestimating how capable Robert is of knowing what he wants right now.

Earth 44 Chris slaps and kisses me within ten seconds of meeting. His mom is a taxidermist and there’s stuffed roadkill decorating every cabinet in the house. Last Christmas the Robert of this Earth stole all the money they’d put aside for top surgery. He had the thickest cock I’d ever seen, Chris says, and yours is not bad, I’m not trying to compare but you asked what he was like. He also left a lot of voice messages, do you want to hear one? His voice is like sinking a thumb into a jar of peanut butter. He sounds nothing like me.

All the medical and non-medical professionals Robert is given mandated appointments with act like this is an intricate situation. It’s not. Once upon a time, a portal malfunctioned, reality became porous, and Robert let a stranger into his bed who got off on the punchline to a sick joke.

“He must’ve been planning it for a while.” Chris often makes comments like this, as if trying to delineate rationale from what happened. “Maybe he was an escaped convict on his Earth.” “Maybe he caused the accident from his end.”

Robert doesn’t want commiseration. He wants to be able to hear Chris’s voice without his spine tightening.

During the time off he’s required to take, Robert contemplates the savagery of infinity.

Chris texts him every day. The lab is shutting down until the end of the year, probably longer. The two of them spent almost a decade building that portal, and now all that research is sentenced to gather dust after its catastrophic debut.

The director calls Robert to tell him what he already figured out: they won’t find the Alternate who did this. Even if they somehow managed to locate the correct Earth, the portal isn’t safe or stable enough for a prolonged manhunt.

Robert starts to sketch his own plan to secretly use the portal. He’s neither stupid nor careless; he’s not interested in vengeance. No, this calculation is about his own ruin.

Earth 521 Chris is a giant arthropod who feeds on my flesh in viscous mouthfuls. They skim the pus from my open wounds for their young. They don’t speak and they never look at me with anything less than hatred. There are other bodies in this tunnel but I’m the only one they watch each night between four and six a.m. One of their young hatches and I wait for it to emerge, a finger’s length of wet crimson, before I snap its boneless neck. The bounce back through the portal before they lunge at me is particularly elastic.

“I didn’t misread that, right?” Robert finally asks, two months after the rescue and two bottles into the lab’s New Year’s Eve party. Chris is huddled at the far end of the sofa, picking at his rhinestone stockings. “The night before the portal accident—you were going to kiss me, weren’t you?”

Chris nods without looking up. He cuts off the blood flow to his index finger by winding a loose stocking thread around it. Robert stares at the flex of Chris’s throat and can’t tell whether he wants to kiss or squeeze the pulse.

“Do you ever wonder,” Robert says and never finishes the question.

“Are you sure you want to use the portal again?” Chris asks eventually.

Earth 85 Chris insists that I accompany him to his abortion appointment. He also makes me pay for the cab there. He reads aloud an article from a magazine in the waiting room. They’re saying the price of honey is affecting stocks. After the abortion Chris takes me to his apartment and edges me with a vibrator for almost two hours. He licks my thighs clean when I come. He says I’ve done so well. He’s gentle and he doesn’t feel anything like I’d hoped.

Robert hacks a keycard to get to the room where the portal is stored. Chris never follows all the way in, but he lingers nearby to run interference in case someone sees them.

Robert doesn’t explain what he’s doing and Chris only asks occasionally.

“The data isn’t complete,” Robert says. He’s not being defensive; it’s true.

“What are you trying to prove here?”

“Not saying anything until the data’s complete.”

“Come on, Rob,” Chris sighs, scrunching up his nose with a half eye-roll. It’s familiar, something Chris used to do when he wanted Robert’s attention after a well-timed physics joke. It’s very much before behaviour, so as much as he wants to respond—as much as he wants to look at Chris for fuck’s sake—he doesn’t.

Earth 31 Chris puts a bullet in my chest before I can get a word out. It’s the shortest portal trip so far. I watch the recording afterwards to see if there’s any context to my murder. The camera only shows 130 milliseconds of marbled ruby and a sky full of eagle beaks—not a flock of birds, but a firmament comprised of that specific bird anatomy. I should be more curious about that. Instead I think about the flicker in this Chris’s eyes before the gunshot, that unmistakable recognition. I don’t know how to explain how immensely comforted that knowledge makes me.

It’s Friday T-shot day. When Chris doesn’t ask, Robert offers to help. They used to always do it together, their own TGIF with shot glasses of M&Ms sorted by color. Robert’s been off testosterone since he started his portal experiment; the Earth-hopping trips, brief as they are, might mess with his schedule.

Robert preps the needle while Chris plays a game on his phone. He used to tease Chris about being trypanophobic as someone who handles biochemicals and electromagnetic fields. Now they only exchange monosyllabic dialogue: “Here?” “Yeah.” “On three.”

“Do you still have those washable pads?” Robert asks afterwards. “My period might come next week.”

“Yeah, of course.” Chris touches his wrist lightly, but his forefinger and thumb encircle like a cuff and Robert backhands him without thinking.

There’s a recurring scenario that Robert can’t tell if it’s a dream, his own fantasy, or residual memory from one of the Earths he’s hopped to recently.

He tells the therapist that it’s a nightmare. One where Chris finds the Alternate before he escapes. Also, somehow the Alternate can transform into synthetic materials at will, so when Chris starts beating him bloody, the Alternate morphs into a life-sized cardboard cutout.

The impact of fists punching through paper is unsatisfactory, but Chris doesn’t stop. He keeps clawing at the cardboard, screaming What did you do to him? What did you do?

The Alternate says Everything he always dreamed of doing with you.

That’s not the important part, but it’s where he always stops the story. What he doesn’t add is what happens after that: dream-Alternate turns to Robert and wiggles the torn flaps of its cardboard lips and says If I liked you more I would’ve killed you.

The real Alternate never said anything like that. If he did, Robert is confident he could’ve easily been more likeable.

Earth 04 Chris immediately clocks me as an Alternate. It doesn’t make him any less angry. Somewhere between the blow to my spleen and the uppercut to my jaw he asks why I’m not fighting back. You know you can’t hurt me, I say, not permanently anyways, and he says that’s not the point. Why are you a fucking pussy, and I don’t mean to laugh, but I do. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done. He takes it as a challenge. I’m curious what he’ll enact, but the portal abruptly bounces, sending me back.

I didn’t activate it.

“What the fuck.” Robert snatches the controls from Chris’s hand so quickly his nails scrape skin. “What are you doing here? I told you to never interru—”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m collecting data—”

“No. No, you’re not.” He’s crying, he’s been crying since before Robert exited the portal. “Why are you putting yourself through this?”

“It’s not about you.”

“Bullshit.”

Robert spins around and Chris flinches. Robert steps forward and Chris sways back.

“Say it.” Robert stands still. “Tell me you know you’re not him. Not any of them.”

Chris stares back through wet eyelashes. “You’re a fucking hypocrite.”

Earth 53 Chris thinks I’m a ghost he successfully summoned. He lights lemongrass candles before asking me to fuck him. Even though he thinks I’m spectral I’ve never felt more self-conscious. He’s pre-op and he says he’s not planning to reconstruct the nipples. He shows me the tattoo that his Robert designed before he died. He talks about their proposal in university and I can’t picture a version of me that didn’t spend a decade pining for their best friend. When he starts masturbating to their wedding album I activate the portal early for the first time.

“You know the reverse reality equation?” Chris’s voice drifts from somewhere to the left. “Eject a single element from the universe without affecting any other?”

“Nowhere close to being proven, but sure.” Robert is sprawled on his back in an empty decontamination stall. He’s almost drunk enough to say out loud that he hates how Chris never straightens up fully anymore or laughs showing teeth.

“Would you use it?”

“The equation? Of course not.”

“I would.” Chris sounds muffled. “Without me, he’d never have come here. He’d—none of my Alternates would even exist.”

Robert snorts. “Neither would I. Do you know how many times the notion that you might love me back has given me impetus to survive?”

“Might?” Chris breathes. “Might?”

Earth 71 Chris is a spool of blood between my fingers. This isn’t a form that’s organic to this Earth. Maybe it’s an experiment gone awry. I clean my hands off on the lingerie draped over the dining room chair. The price tags are still on the bra strap. There’s a framed picture of this Earth’s Robert holding a puppy. No dog food is in the house but there’s an enormous empty cage that could fit four Great Danes. The refrigerator has nothing inside except a leather-bound diary where every page has I’m sorry written over and over.

“Reassigned?” Robert shoves a file across Chris’s desk. “I never asked you to do that.”

“I know.” He’s avoiding eye contact, which is Robert’s patented move. There’s a loss of equilibrium in seeing the strategy used by another. “It’s not about you.”

“So then don’t go.”

“Don’t what? You can barely be in the same room as me.”

“Chris, that’s not—”

“You’re afraid of me.” Chris says it evenly, precisely. He hides his shaking hands under the file pages. “I am the same face, the same voice, the same fucking smell of—” he pauses, blinks, then— “That will never change unless I go.”

“That’s not fair,” Robert snaps. “So far I’ve gone to seventeen different Earths, met all kinds of inorganic and disassembled versions of you, and I can always recognize you. Always. Except the one time I didn’t, and I have to figure out why, the cause of that, and that’s what I’m trying to do, Chris, because I’ve been scared my entire life but never of you, never, and I won’t let him take that from me.”

Earth 19 Chris is an ocean cluttered with dismembered orcas. I float on my back and the water that washes over my skin burns like vinegar. The waves are imbibed with a sorrow that itches my eardrums. I miss a civilization I’ve never known. The ocean tries to tell me that I’m safe here but it also admits it has been bleeding for three thousand years. Tomorrow is the start of the three thousandth and first. If I want, I can stay to see if it’s any different.

“I miss you.” Robert intends it as a whisper; the toilet bowl reverberates his drunken exhale to a choir.

Chris pulls his knees up and rests his chin on the side of the bathtub. “I’m right here.”

“Not the way you used to be.” Robert moves to wipe the spittle from his mouth but the toilet paper keeps flickering in and out of focus. “Not the way we could’ve been.”

Chris shifts, bare feet squeaking against the fiberglass. “What about sometime in the future?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” Robert hums. “I told him things I only ever wanted you to know, words I can’t even hold on my tongue anymore. We’ll never get that back. We can’t.”

Over his shoulder Chris swallows a sob. “Tell me what to do.”

The frigid porcelain rim soothes Robert’s flushed cheeks. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know.”

Earth 111 Chris screams at me for twenty minutes and he reeks of spoiled beef stew. Every time I remind this Chris that I’m not his Robert he spasms, head to toe. Do you think I don’t know that? He gets up close, sour-sweet onion breath infecting my nostrils. Do you think it matters? I’m telling you everything I never got to say before he killed me. Only then do I notice the patch of exposed scalp and globules of gray dripping from his caved-in skull.

“I want to try something.”

“Okay.”

“I want to—I don’t want him to be the only one who—listen, I don’t know if I can ever do more than this, but that doesn’t matter. I just, I want to show you me.”

Robert’s proud of how little his voice is shaking when he finishes undressing. He waits for Chris to approach, waits for his fingertips to brush across the fresh stubble on his jaw and down the slope of his shoulders and across the crescents of his chest scars and over the soft of his belly to the silky pubic curls.

Chris wraps both arms around his neck, breathes against his clavicle. “You’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “You’re so beautiful.”

Earth 67 Chris is a bronze house key attached to a dark blue shoestring under a plastic doormat. There’s a key-shaped imprint on the concrete step beneath, as if no one’s crossed the threshold of this house for years. Neither do I. I kneel on the porch and pick the key up. Beams of sunlight caterwaul around the crusty edges. I put the key on my tongue and swallow and spit him out and suck on the rust again and choke and choke and choke.

“Ask me,” Robert says over the rim of his coffee mug. “I want to tell you.”

Chris looks down and tucks his hands into his lap. He does this a lot these days, consciously withdrawing to the border of the space between them. He almost shakes his head.

“Please.” Robert knows he’s hurting Chris to make him ask. He’ll regret the cruelty later; right now he needs Chris to be the only person in the world who hears this.

“When did you figure out,” Chris starts slowly, “that he wasn’t me?”

Robert gets up to refill his cup from the canteen machine. The acridness of the memory is crawling up the back of his throat and he imagines drilling a nail through his tongue.

“He laughed at me.” Robert digs his nails against the glazed design on the side of the mug. “It was just a little moment mid-conversation, I brought up something I felt shitty about, and he just. Yeah.” His thumbnail cracks. “You wouldn’t. You don’t.”

Earth 301 Chris hasn’t stood upright for more than a century. Glaciers are wedged under his armpits and a landslide trickles every time he twitches his toes. He doesn’t speak, he sings, and only telepathically. He reads my mind so I don’t have to explain why I’m here, which is a relief. He sings a refrain about second chances and coughs through a super-cell tornado that rips apart three states. What does it matter that we get to try again, I say. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.

It’s T-shot Friday again. Robert is back on testosterone. He’s put his portal experiment on hiatus for now and Chris doesn’t ask why.

Robert stays in the room after the shots and Chris starts playing a game on his phone. Robert leans his head next to him, watching rows of matching fruits disappear in a burst of sparkles on the screen. Chris smiles softly and continues to play.

A few of the tears gathering in Robert’s eyes slip over the bridge of his nose. The hopeful moments always destroy him. He’s so tired of mourning. He shuts his eyes and expands his lungs with just enough air to hold.  

Copyright © 2026 by Elena Sichrovsky