The peregrine falcon bobs her head once, looks from side to side, and takes off from the sandstone gargoyle where she’s been perching. The neck of the carved statue cracks and falls toward the ground.
First, it falls in Abbas’s world, where Lori is standing thirty meters beneath it. It connects with her head two seconds later and kills her instantly. Abbas, who is standing just a meter behind her, screams, looks up, and then drops to a crouch by her side, hoping in vain he might help this stranger who was just moments ago queuing in front of him to buy her train ticket. He feels faint at the sight of all the blood.
Ten seconds later, the gargoyle falls in Lori’s world. By that time, the queue at the foot of the building has moved forward by a meter. Now Abbas is standing directly beneath the plummeting stone, and it kills him instantly instead. Lori turns around, gasps, and pulls out her phone to call an ambulance.
Lori’s world is not Abbas’s world, and Abbas’s world is not Lori’s. Both are real, but they are separate, overlapping nowhere. There is an Abbas in Lori’s world, but he isn’t conscious there; and there is a Lori in Abbas’s world, but she isn’t conscious there. And there are other worlds where neither is conscious. In some of them, others are conscious; in some of them, nothing is. There are many, many such other worlds. Different ones play out different possibilities, different ways things could go, different futures that might unfold depending on the outcomes of each of the myriad chance events that populate them—which way a tossed coin lands, which number comes up from the roll of a die; which route this person takes to work, which train carriage that person chooses to ride in; whether this iceberg calves from its glacier this second or the next, whether that bumblebee lands on that foxglove or the dandelion below it. In fact, whatever way things might be, there’s a world where things are that way.
I’ve reviewed the episode of the falling gargoyle ten times in the two days since I assigned Abbas to his world and Lori to hers. I think it’s because it’s the first time in my year of doing
