Hannah nearly cried with bittersweet emotions. Sharing her ordeal made her feel half as crazy as she did five minutes ago, which made the current nightmare twice as real.
“Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m sorry I went all psycho on you.”
“No worries,” he said, and then chuckled at his own choice of words. Hannah was too rattled to follow the humor.
“I’m an actress,” she offered after an uncomfortable silence.
“Really? Like for a living?”
“No. I wish. During the day, I work as a traffic coordinator at a medical advertising agency. I run between the creatives and the executives and try to keep them all on schedule while they yell at each other through me.”
“Huh. Interesting.”
“Not really.”
“No, I mean it’s interesting that we both keep talking about this stuff in the present tense.”
Hannah felt a cold squeeze around her heart. Zack was obviously five steps ahead of her on the road to acceptance. She didn’t enjoy the dog-leash tug.
He nervously rotated the silver-colored band on his wrist. Despite its airy weight, the bracelet seemed undentable, unscuffable. He couldn’t find the hint of a seam.
“The money’s blue here,” Zack announced after another silence.
“What?”
“I found a coffee stand while I was stumbling around. I tried to pay with one of my tens and the vendor stared at me like I was nuts. So I’m kicked out of line and I see the next guy pay with a shiny blue twenty. It had Theodore Roosevelt on it.”
Hannah took another swig of her bottled water. She noticed small patches of ash on Zack’s neck and a few more on his shirt and jeans.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
“Brooklyn. I was supposed to fly back tomorrow morning.”
“Oh. Wow. You have family there?”
“I do. At least I did. I can’t imagine they’re . . .”
He stroked his chin with trembling fingers, fixing his glassy stare at faraway shores.
“Did you notice that all the license plates here say South California? You guys usually refer to it as Southern California, am I right?”
Hannah sighed. “You are right.”
“I also noticed that the cars are more rounded. Bubbly. Not like they were in the 1950s but—”
“I saw a flying ambulance,” she blurted.
“I saw a flying taxi,” he replied with an uneasy smirk. “I was building up to that.”
“Zack, what the hell’s going on?”
In addition to acceptance, Hannah’s new friend was five steps ahead on the road to understanding. From the moment Zack ruled out the Rip van Winkle scenario—thanks to a discarded, date-stamped lottery ticket—the wheels in his mind kept spinning back to the words alternate and parallel. He wasn’t ready to verbalize his hypothesis.
“I don’t know,” he said, his knees bouncing with anxious energy. “Until I saw you and your bracelet, I was pretty sure I’d lost my mind.”
“Do you have a history of mental illness?”
Zack eyed her with furrowed perplexity. “Are you suggesting that I’m hallucinating all this? Because I think that’d be bad news for you.”
“No. I only asked because I do have a history. I’ve been hospitalized.”
“For what? Schizophrenia?”
“No. Just . . . emotional stuff.”
“Well, that’s a far cry from seeing flying ambulances.”
“Look, I’m just going by that thing. I forget what it’s called. Where the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”
“Occam’s razor.”
“Yeah, Occam’s razor. And right now the simplest explanation is that we’re both having some kind of psychotic breakdown. It’s either that or . . .” She pointed to the latest floating baby stroller to pass their bench. “What do you think’s more likely?”
Zack pursed his lips, exhaling in frustrated sputters. “Denial.”
“Who, you or me?”
“You.”
“What, you think I want to be crazy?”
“I think it beats the alternative,” he said. “I’d love to wake up in a rubber room right now. Because that would mean that nobody really died and everything has a chance of going back to normal. Unfortunately, I’ve never done well with rosy scenarios. After twenty-eight years of Jewish conditioning, I’ve come to believe the darkest explanation is usually the right one. Call it Menachem’s razor.”
Hannah scowled at him. “How can you even joke right now?”
The cartoonist jerked a listless shrug. “Just how I cope.”
“If you’re so convinced this is real, Zack, then help me. Tell me what’s happening.”
“I don’t know!”
“At least tell me how you got your bracelet.”
From the edgy look on his face, Hannah realized she was the one tugging the dog leash now. She also realized that Zack wasn’t as nerdy as he first seemed. Up close, she could sense a thin layer of hardness behind his boyish features, the same uptight strength her sister always carried. Hannah would have killed for some of that now.
“It was pretty insane where I was,” he attested.
“So a white-haired guy didn’t come to talk to you.”
“Someone did, but he didn’t say much. I couldn’t tell if he had white hair.”