“It’s been so nice talking with you,” said the father with the bandana at the pool, “You have a great day,” and as I looked back from my kids, we slipped the timeline and I dove into his eyes.

Into a green space, emerald-shining, soft as down and feathers everywhere. Sneeze-laughter. His crows’ feet turned out to be warm valleys where we rolled down, down, coming to rest, feeling the live earth-flesh breathe beneath our backs.

Spooned together like custard, creamy-sweet, we drowsed. Woke to voices of new-familiar children, not his or mine but ours. Watched them play at lakeside, mountains of lush pine beyond.

Drank the blue air. Knew that never would there be a cell phone tower there. His hands pillowed my hips, our heart/throat/bellies entwined, beating.

His millions of cell membranes shimmered, iridescent coral lapis gold, pulsing out a signal. “I am here, I am here, though you don’t see me I will always hold you.”

“You, too,” I said.

***

When I read the above to my friend Greta Ode, she replied with a story of her own.

Worlds Collide

The warmth and buzz of the electric heater in the corner made Mrs. Brewer sleepy. Stacks of ruffled papers lay askew. A visual hum echoed the sound of the heater. Her senses were merging comfortably in a strange synesthesia. The scents of leather and wood and old tobacco and men’s deep thoughts (mostly men) echoed down the decades of The Institute, making it hard to pay attention to the fact that her daughter was attempting to commit her to what in the old days would be called the asylum.

“Is it dementia, doctor?” her daughter Amelia, age 93, asked.

Dementia, thought Mrs. Brewer. Hmph. All is as it should be.

Mrs. Brewer’s Awareness had begun months ago. Increasing incidents of deja vu were the first sign of some change in her mind. But it was not her mind. It was a change in everything, which registered in her mind.

She had always been sensitive to deja vu. When she met her husband, Paul – gone now for as long as they’d been married – she knew they’d met before. Their first conversation was almost identical to what she remembered (which hadn’t happened). He felt it, too. They began finishing each other’s sentence, and they knew they were in love.

But was it love? Or was it some familiarity or recapitulation at work? It became love.

His death felt the same as when they met – that sense of having been through it before. The events preceding his death, and the grief afterward, were revealed to her in layers of memories of things that had never happened. Or had they?

“The Post-String Revolution has changed the way we think of consciousness,” the doctor was saying. “Extreme awareness of the multiverse, such as your mother is experiencing, is a relatively new phenomenon that has emerged with the advent of super-aging.”

Mrs. Brewer had heard this conversation many times. Most conversations were familiar to her now – and yet always slightly different than she expected.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t get it,” Amelia said.

“Of course not, dear,” Mrs. Brewer said. Or thought she said–perhaps she heard an echo. “You never did understand anything past algebra. Your mind is more like your father’s.”

Mrs. Brewer’s Awareness of places hidden behind ever-thinning veils of time had only recently become noticeable to others. Hence, the appointments at The Institute, the clucking over wills and accounts, the review of things she had organized decades ago, in her 90’s. Hence, the insistence that she allow Amelia, and Amelia’s daughter Lori, to take turns watching her ramble about her big old house, and to sit with her in the unkempt garden with the koi pond she had insisted on having created last summer – for no reason other than that she thought she was supposed to have one.

“Have you heard,” said the doctor, “the analogy of the loaf of bread?”

“I suppose,” said Amelia.

“The multiverse is like a loaf of bread with infinite slices, each cut representing some event that creates a new universe. The slices become increasingly slim, but the bread is infinite…”

Shifts must be where slices are, thought Mrs. Brewer.

“I understand now,” said Amelia, though Mrs. Brewer rather doubted it.

Perhaps the koi pond was the first Great Shift, as Mrs. Brewer had decided to call the phenomenon. She would be doing one thing, in one place – Here and Now – and she suddenly felt she was in another place, or should be. Sometimes she believed she was missing something, like a koi pond, in this place.

Or suddenly Paul would be walking by her side, holding her hand, aged appropriately. Once she was by the koi pond, almost remembering something that had happened long ago in Japan, where she’d never been, when suddenly she was at lunch with Amelia and Lori, except their names were Chiyo and Ima. Sometimes she would be alone in the garden; and then with Paul, who was not quite Paul, under cherry trees. Or in a bier garten with Georg, who was also not quite Paul, eating wurst and pumpernickel with cold butter.

The shifts had become more frequent lately, and more subtle. Lesser Shifts. A vanilla ice cream cone would turn to chocolate, then vanish, leaving her hands clean. She would be watching a robin, and it was a squirrel.

One would think this would be disorienting, but it felt natural. Expected.

“So each individual’s universe is a slice of multiverse. But with each significant event or decision, the individual’s slice splits into more and more slices.”

Mrs. Brewer had heard this conversation many times before. Or perhaps she was hearing it all at once, now.

“But what is happening to her?” Amelia asked.

“In short, your mother’s universes are merging.”

Amelia gasped in dismay.

“Dearest, you must not be upset, it feels quite natural,” said Mrs. Brewer, both here and somewhere else.

“Indeed,” said the doctor, “It is natural. We believe it happens to everyone as they approach the end of life. It is only the Maximum Elderly – pardon the terminology, Mrs. Brewer – who are aware of this merge, with the awareness becoming stronger as death approaches.”

Mrs. Brewer nodded, enjoying the pleasant sense of riffling papers and humming air and tobacco, taste and hearing and touch wrapped together across time.

“It starts slowly, but then progresses quickly,” the doctor said. “The process seems to be benign, even comforting. Natural, as your mother says.”

“But what are we to do?” said Amelia.

“There is nothing to do,” said the doctor.

“While universes collide?” said Amelia, in astonishment.

“Merge,” said Mrs. Brewer, to an equally distraught Japanese daughter in a different Institute in Tokyo.

“Merge, my darling,” said Mrs. Brewer to Amelia.

“Merge… collide… Oh, what’s the difference! She will forget me!”

“This is not dementia,” said the doctor.

“I am not forgetting you, dear,” said Mrs. Brewer. “I am becoming aware of more. I think the bigger news is that the doctor says I’m dying.”

Amelia gasped again, with a little cry.

“It’s true,” said the doctor. “Predictor MRI shows she will have a stroke within the next few days. Really, any time now.”

Mrs. Brewer shifted into a small kitchen, where she was drinking black coffee and playing solitaire. The smell of red cabbage and fresh, warm, dark bread. She gathers the cards, shuffling and integrating, shuffling and integrating. I am being shuffled, Mrs. Brewer thinks. I am cards, but soon I will be a deck.

“Perhaps it is happening now,” the doctor says.

Amelia’s eyes well with tears.

“Mrs. Brewer?” the doctor taps her hand gently, bringing her to Here and Now.

“If I could only have a party,” says Mrs. Brewer. “A tea party, by the koi pond. We shall have cucumber and cold butter on dark bread.”

Paul is sitting next to her. He looks down at her and kisses her forehead with soft lips. I’m so glad you’re here, darling,” she says.

“Do something!” says Amelia.

“But don’t you understand? The loaf is becoming unsliced,” says the doctor. “She is becoming whole.”

I do hope I’m a nice big pumpernickel, Mrs. Brewer says, to a different daughter, elsewhere, who has a sense of humor. What is that word that states the part for the whole, Mrs. Brewer thinks. I am Mrs. Brewer, but I am every Mrs. Brewer that ever was.

Synecdoche.

Synecdoche, synchronicity, synesthesia.

“White noise,” says Mrs. Brewer. “It is like being wrapped in a blanket of soft white noise.”

The papers in the office, all layered and askew, begin to shuffle and flutter, and the layers of her existence sort themselves around her until she is complete.

All is silent, and she listens, rapt, to everything she has ever been.