Part 3 of Guilty in Every World
In His Place
He crossed into a world where the local Rasmus Holt was convicted in June and is serving eleven years. The bench is cold, the box is gone, and when he finds the house, the woman inside tells him he came last Tuesday.
He has a rule now, written on the inside of the lid where he cannot avoid it.
Arrive. Do not speak. Find out who you are here before anybody tells you.
He has kept it twice. This is the third.
The bench was cold and that was the first thing wrong.
He had been doing this for five weeks and he had a shape for it now: the hum, the wrong door numbers, and then a bench with a box-shaped gap in the dust and a transformer on it still warm from a man who had left in a hurry. Twice that had been the case. Both times there had been somebody in the building within four minutes.
This time the dust on the bench was undisturbed and grey and had the particular flatness of dust that has been lying since before the summer, and the transformer was gone entirely, and there was a strip of blue and white tape across the door of the room with a seal on it and a date.
June.
Rasmus stood in the dark for a while with his own box in his arms, keeping the first rule, which is the hardest of them.
Then he went and found a newspaper.
"Read it to me," he said, in a bus shelter, holding the phone over the page.
"The photograph is you," Pim said.
"I know the photograph is me. Read it."
"Rasmus Holt, forty, formerly of the Oostveld Institute, sentenced on the eleventh of June to eleven years for the manslaughter of Elke Vos, a research technician, at the Institute in February. He maintained throughout that he had no memory of the night in question. The court described the defence as, and I am reading the paper's word, unusual."
The bus shelter had a light in it that buzzed, and Rasmus listened to it buzz and did the arithmetic he did not want to do.
Delft. A technician. A night with no memory. A man convicted on his own log-in and his own name and his own hands.
"Pim, in the Delft I came from. What was the technician called."
"Joost Peeters."
"And the date."
"March."
"And here it is February and a woman called Elke Vos." He rubbed his eyes. "Two worlds. Same institute, same basement, same defence, and the defence is true in both of them, and in both of them there is no box on the bench afterwards."
"You are constructing a pattern from two instances."
"Yes."
"I am obliged to say that two is not many."
"It is if it is the same two," Rasmus said. "Find me the address."
The address was eleven kilometres away and he had four euros.
That is the part nobody thinks about, and he had not thought about it either for the first fortnight, and now it was most of what he thought about. A door that opens onto anywhere is not transport. It puts you in a basement in a city with no money in your pocket and no card that is safe to use and a face that is on a file, and then it is half past ten at night and the trams want one euro ninety and you have four.
So he went back into the Institute, past the sealed door, and up two floors to the staff changing rooms, and stood in front of a bank of grey lockers looking for a number he already knew.
B-14 had a locker. Every Rasmus Holt has a locker, because every Rasmus Holt cycles in, and the number matches his room because he asked for it to on his first day out of a superstition he has never admitted to anybody.
The combination was his mother's birthday backwards. It has been his mother's birthday backwards since he was twenty-two.
It opened.
He stood in an empty changing room at twenty to eleven at night and looked into a small metal box containing another man's entire arrangement for being alive, and it was his arrangement, down to the order of it.
A spare inner tube. A folding multitool with the pliers stiff. Two hundred and ten euros in a bank envelope, because a man who has once been stranded at Utrecht Centraal with a dead phone keeps cash in his locker for the rest of his life. A photograph of Marieke on a beach, printed rather than on a phone, because he had gone through a period of thinking that was important and had evidently gone through it here too.
And underneath, in a plastic wallet, a passport.
Rasmus took it out and opened it to the photograph and looked at himself for a while.
"Pim. How old is this branch."
"I cannot tell you that."
"Guess badly and I will correct you."
"The Institute is the same, the building numbering is the same, the currency is the same and your mother's birthday is the same. If it split, it split recently and in a way that does not reach any of the things I can see."
"Then my thumb works on his passport."
"On that reasoning, yes."
He put two hundred and ten euros in his coat and the passport in his inside pocket and the photograph back exactly where it had been, and he stood there with his hand on the locker door for longer than he had any time for.
"Say the thing you are not saying," Pim said.
"He is in Vught."
"Yes."
"He is in Vught for eleven years for something he did not do, and I have just taken his money and his passport out of his locker, and the reason I can do it is that I am him." He shut the door and the lock turned over with a sound that seemed much too loud. "There is a man in this country tonight who has lost his job, his wife, his liberty and his name, and I have come through a hole in his basement and taken the last four things he owned that were not in an evidence bag."
"You need them."
"So did the one in the house," Rasmus said. "That is what frightens me. Not that he did it. That he will have had a sentence for it exactly this good."
He put the backpack on both straps, because fifteen pounds on one will have you leaning inside a kilometre, and walked out through the bike racks into the rain.
The tram took him as far as the ring. He walked the rest, forty minutes along a canal in a city he half knew, past three cash machines he did not use, and the whole way he was composing the sentence he would say to her, and every version of it was a version of the truth and every single one of them sounded, when he tried it in his mouth, exactly like a man who had come to take something.
The house was on a street in the north of the city with a canal at one end and a cycle rack outside every door, and he stood across the water from it for fifty minutes in the cold, keeping the first rule, until he understood that keeping the first rule was going to teach him nothing and that he had been using it, for two worlds now, as a way of not knocking on doors.
She answered on the second knock.
It was Marieke, and it was not, in the way that all of them were and were not: this one had cut her hair short and had a grey streak at the front that his own had not had, and she was thinner, and she looked at him with an expression he had no file for at all.
"You said Thursday," she said.
Rasmus kept his face still with an effort that hurt.
"I know."
"You said Thursday, and I moved my mother, and I have spent the whole day doing it." She stepped back from the door, which was worse than anything she could have said, because it was the small unconsidered movement of a woman letting her husband in. "Take your shoes off, it is filthy out."
He took his shoes off.
He stood in a hallway with a coat on the hook that was his coat, in a cut he had never owned, and a pair of his shoes by the mat with the heels worn on the outside edge exactly the way he wore heels, and he understood the whole of it about nine seconds before he could make himself say anything.
"Marieke. When did I last come here?"
She stopped with her hand on the kitchen door.
"Tuesday," she said. "Rasmus, what is wrong with you."
He got himself out of the house by saying that he had left something at the station and would be twenty minutes, and she said all right in a voice that had two years of something in it, and he walked to the end of the street and put his back against a wall and breathed until he could see.
"Pim. Tell me what I am looking at."
"I do not have enough to tell you anything."
"Then let me say it and you tell me where it is wrong." He had his hands over his face. "A man crosses into a world. He is careful. He picks a place he already understands, which is the Institute, because he worked there in every world there is. He does something at two in the morning, and the person he does it to is somebody who happened to be in the building, and it does not matter who, because the point was never that person."
"Go on."
"The point was the local one. The man whose name is on the log-in and whose hands match and who will stand up in court and say, truthfully, that he has no memory of it, because he was not there, because the man who was there has his face." Rasmus heard his own voice going somewhere thin. "He is not building alibis for himself. He does not need one. Nobody in this world can even name the place he went. He is building convictions for other people. Specifically for us."
"Why."
"Because a Rasmus Holt in prison is a Rasmus Holt who is not in the house."
The phone did not say anything for a second, which it did when it was doing nothing at all and he had learned to read as thinking.
"That is one explanation," Pim said.
"Give me another."
"I cannot."
"No," Rasmus said. "Neither can I."
He went back at half past nine and let himself in with the key from under the pot, because he knew where the key would be, and that was the most frightening thing he did that week.
The house was warm. There was a television on somewhere and the smell of a real dinner, and a bicycle in the hall with a puncture repair kit open beside it, and on the table in the front room a hospital letter about her mother with two dates circled in a hand that was his hand.
He sat down in the dark in the front room and waited for himself to come home.
It took forty minutes. He heard the key, and the door, and a bag going down, and a voice saying something ordinary about the weather, and her answering from the kitchen in a tone she had not used with him at all.
Then the front room light went on.
He was heavier than Rasmus. That was the first thing. Better fed, better slept, better dressed, with the beginnings of a stomach and a haircut somebody had paid for, and he stood in the doorway of his own front room and looked at the man in the chair and did not flinch even slightly.
"Shoes off?" he said.
"Yes."
"Good. She notices." He shut the door behind him with his foot and sat down opposite, comfortable, and put his hands on his knees in a way Rasmus recognised from photographs of his own father. "How long have you had the box?"
"Five weeks."
"Ah." A small, genuine wince. "Then you have not slept and you have not eaten and you are running on the idea that you are going to fix something. I remember it. It passes."
"You put a man in prison."
"I did."
Rasmus had prepared nine sentences on the way and all of them went.
"Say it again," he said.
"I put him in prison. He is in Vught, he has eleven years, he will serve seven, and he will come out at forty-eight to a woman who will not be there." He said it the way you read out a train time. "And before you ask, because I can see you queuing it up: no, I do not think I am a good man, and no, I have not made my peace with it, and yes, I still do it. Those three things are allowed to be true together. You will find that out."
"Elke Vos is dead."
"Yes." Something crossed his face then, the first real thing. "That one I did not plan and I have never done again. I needed him in a cell and I had a room and a log-in and I thought it would be enough on its own, and she came down the stairs at two in the morning because she had left a coat." He looked at the carpet. "Nobody believes this, and I do not require you to, but I have been to eleven worlds since and in every single one of them I have found out what she was called."
"Why the wives."
"That is the wrong question and it is the one everybody asks." He leaned forward. "Ask me the right one."
"What is the right one?"
"Ask me what happened to mine."
Rasmus did not say anything.
"Nothing," the other man said. "Nothing happened to her. That is the whole of it and it is so stupid that I have never said it to anybody. She did not die and I did not lose her in a fire. In my Delft she got up one morning when we were thirty-four and said she had been unhappy for six years, which I had not noticed, and she was right, and she was kind about it, and she left, and I was alone in a flat with a bench in it for four years and then I built a box."
"So you take someone else's."
"I take a life that was running perfectly well and I keep it running perfectly well." He gestured at the room, the bicycle, the hospital letter. "Look at it. Her mother has a bed at the Reinier because I got on the phone and I was patient for six hours, and he would not have been, because he was never patient about anything that was not on a bench. She has not had a bad year. She has had the best year she has had since she was thirty. And there is exactly one person in this house who is unhappy and he is sitting in your chair."
"She does not know."
"No."
"Then it is not her life. It is a performance you are doing at her."
For the first time the other one stopped looking comfortable.
"Yes," he said.
Rasmus stood up.
"Here is what I came to say, and then I am going, and you are not going to stop me, because stopping me means noise and noise means her." He was surprised at how level he sounded. "Two worlds. Joost Peeters in March in mine, Elke Vos in February in yours. You have been to eleven. How many of them had a bench with nothing on it?"
The other man went very still.
"That is not me," he said.
"I did not say it was."
"I have done this twice. Twice. Here, and one other, and the other one is alive and well and living in a city I am never going back to." He had got up too now. "Delft in March was not mine. I was not there in March, I was in Ghent, I can tell you the street."
They stood in a front room with a television going through the wall and looked at each other, and Rasmus watched a man work out, in real time, that he was not the worst thing in his own field.
"How many of us are doing this," Rasmus said.
"I thought one." The other one's voice had changed entirely. "I thought I was the only one clever enough and I have been quite proud of it, and I would like you to know that I am hearing how that sounds."
"Then there is a third."
"There is at least a third."
"And he did Delft." Rasmus picked up the box. "Which means the man they convicted in my world did not do it either, and he knew it, and he ran, and I have spent five weeks thinking he was the worst thing that had ever happened to me."
He was in the hall with his shoes half on when the other one said, from the doorway, in a completely different voice:
"Wait. Where are you from?"
"Delft."
"Which Delft. What is your marker. What did you leave on?"
"Nine and a quarter," Rasmus said, before he had decided to.
And he watched the man in the doorway not react, which was somehow far worse than reacting, because a man who does not react to a number has decided in advance not to.
"Go," the other one said.
"Why."
"Because a third one is doing Delft, and a third one heard what I heard just now if he is anywhere he can hear it, and because you have just told a stranger with your face the only thing about you that is actually rare." He said the next part carefully, the way you hand somebody something sharp. "And because mine was the best year she has had since she was thirty. Think about what that means about the year she was having before I arrived, and then think about your Marieke, on her own, in a Delft where everybody has agreed her husband killed a man."
Rasmus got the door open.
"She is not on her own," he said. "She has him. The one who ran."
"Yes," said the man in the hallway of a house he had stolen. "That is what I am telling you."