I couldn’t help but gulp. “What’s number two?”
Moti reached across the table and grabbed my arm, firmly gripping it beneath his left one. The motion sent the beautiful Turkish coffee cup he’d slid to me off its ceramic saucer. I braced myself for the shattering sound, but Moti nonchalantly caught it with his right hand and placed it back on the table. Moti’s hand then found its way over to his left wrist, and began slowly rolling up his sleeve. I saw something shiny and metallic on his wrist. It was a watch, one of the antique analog models, with both time and calendar functions. He tapped his manicured fingernail against the watch’s crystal face. Against my reflection.
“Yoel, this man you see here, this is not Joel Byram. That other Joel Byram in Costa Rica? He has been assigned your identity. William Taraval was at least right about this one thing: the man you saw with your wife, he is the real you now. Do you understand, Yoel? You are no one.”
I shook my head. Maybe I’d been hoping for some kind of magic fix, a do-over, but hearing him state my situation so plainly, something inside me broke.
Imagine looking in the mirror and not knowing who you are. An empty face staring back. No one. We rarely think about how much air is around us until we can’t breathe. We always imagine what it would be like to be someone else, but when we do so, it’s with the guise that beneath it all, we know who we really are. Take that away, and who are we?
I opened my mouth, but couldn’t make air enter my lungs.
“Yoel, are you all right?” Moti said. He sounded like he was at the other end of a cave.
When a person is drowning, there isn’t time for them to exhale or call out. Their eyes are glassy, unable to focus. It just seems like they’re distracted. The best way to check is to ask if they’re all right. If they just stare blankly, then they’re probably drowning.
“Yoel, breathe.” Moti shook me.
“I—”
“You are hyperventilating. Don’t talk. Just listen. It’s actually much worse than you think. But it will be okay.”
I was below the surface, water filling my lungs, but I refused to give in. I kicked for the surface, grasping at two words like a life vest: “Third … thing?”
Moti laughed, slapping a hand on my back as he exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke. “Good boy, you are tougher than I thought. The third thing, I suspect you have already guessed—I am not really a travel agent.”
He took a long drag of his nicotine stick, the cherry flaring like a warning light. “Yoel, how much do you know about the Big Mac?”
THE BIG MAC OF THESEUS
THE MONA LISA, as I grew up to know it, was a painting that was once known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, the authenticity and history of which was fraught with contention.
Shortly before World War I, an English art collector discovered a Mona Lisa look-alike in the home of a Somerset nobleman in whose family’s possession it had been for nearly a century. This discovery led to the conjecture that Leonardo painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo, aka the Mona Lisa: the infamous one destroyed in the aforementioned da Vinci Exhibition teleportation accident, and the one discovered in Somerset and then brought to Isleworth, where it eventually came to be known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa.
The story goes that da Vinci began painting Mona Lisa in 1503, but left her unfinished. Then, in 1517, a completed Mona Lisa surfaced in Leonardo’s private possession shortly before his death. This work of art is the same one that was destroyed in the solar storm of 2109. But supporters of the Isleworth Mona Lisa contend that it is the first iteration of the lost masterpiece, begun in 1503, a full ten years before the “real” Mona Lisa was painted.
More credibility was added to this theory when it was discovered that in 1584, an art historian named Gian Paolo Lomazzo wrote about “della Gioconda, e di Mona Lisa”—the Gioconda, and the Mona Lisa. Since La Gioconda was sometimes used as an alternative title for the Mona Lisa, the reference implied that there were indeed two separate paintings, with the Isleworth Mona Lisa being the original version of her more famous sister.
What I’m getting at is, since 2109, whenever people went to a museum to see the Mona Lisa, they were really admiring the Isleworth Mona Lisa. Even though it’s the only version of the painting people in my generation ever knew, and even though it was probably created first, our knowledge of the other Mona Lisa, the one that vanished into quantum foam, makes the Isleworth portrait feel like a cheap knock-off.
But is it? Or is the painting formerly known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa now the actual Mona Lisa?
As Moti explained it to me, that question is best contemplated over a Big Mac.
Say you go to McDonald’s and order a Big Mac. Pretty much everyone in the place knows what you’re asking for. You could ask the ma?tre d’, the manager, the janitor—hell, you could turn around and ask the person behind you in line what a Big Mac is and they’ll tell you: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions—on a sesame seed bun.” Right?
But is every Big Mac the same?
Well, you might think, they sure taste the same.
Does it matter which breed of cow the meat came from? What type of soil the lettuce was grown in? The yeast used in the bread? In other words, what makes it a Big Mac?
You may be surprised to learn that some of the world’s smartest scientific mercenaries battled with this dilemma for centuries: How could they ensure that every time someone bit into a Big Mac, they’d get the same, consistent “Big Mac dining experience”—in my case, fatty protein tinged with a hint of regret?
My personal feelings aside, it turns out that this replication is much harder to do than you’d think. Sometimes there’s too much lettuce, sometimes the buns are too mushy, maybe there aren’t enough pickles, and so on. There were just so many ways in which one Big Mac could be different from another, and that was a big problem.
Every year since the Big Mac’s inception in 1967, the McDonald’s-Huáng Corporation17 has utilized a combination of the earth’s brightest humans and technological advances to ensure that whenever you stepped into a McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac, you’d get the exact same Big Mac.