beyond my control, much as a surfer might be tossed from his board in the collapsing barrel of a mammoth wave, I was magically churned out of that weird chamber and—
—into the drab living room.
I found myself not tumbled in a heap, as I might have expected to be, but standing approximately where I had stood earlier. I picked up one of the paperback romance novels. As before, the pages made no noise, and I could hear only those sounds of internal origin, such as my heart beating.
Glancing at my wristwatch, I convinced myself that this was, indeed, earlier. I had not merely been magically transported from the black room to the living room but also had been cast a few minutes backward in time.
Since I had a moment ago seen myself peering into the blackness from the hall doorway, I could assume that by the grace of some anomaly in the laws of physics, two of me now existed simultaneously in this house. There were the me here with a Nora Roberts novel in my hands and the other me in some nearby room.
At the start, I warned you that I lead an unusual life.
A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness. This flexibility allowed me to adjust to these events and accept the reality of time travel more quickly than you would have done, which does not reflect badly on you, considering that you would have been wise enough to get the hell out of the house.
I didn’t flee. Neither did I at once retrace my original route to Fungus Man’s bedroom—with its scatter of underwear and socks, the half-eaten raisin Danish on the nightstand—or to his bathroom.
Instead, I put down the romance novel and stood quite still, carefully thinking through the possible ramifications of encountering the other Odd Thomas, responsibly calculating the safest and most rational course of action.
Okay, that’s bullshit. I could worry about the ramifications, but I didn’t have either enough phenomenal experience or the brain power to imagine all of them, let alone to figure out the best way to extract myself from this bizarre situation.
I’m less skilled at extracting myself from trouble than I am at plunging into it.
At the living-room archway, I cautiously peeked into the hallway and spotted the other me standing at the open door of the black room. This must have been the earlier me that had not yet crossed that threshold.
If all sound had not by now been entirely suppressed within the house, I would have been able to call out to that other Odd Thomas. I’m not sure that would have been prudent, and I’m grateful that the circumstances prevented me from hailing him.
If I had been able to speak to him, I’m not certain what I would have said. How’s it hanging?
Were I to walk up to him and give him a narcissistic hug, the paradox of two Odd Thomases might at once be resolved. One of us might disappear. Or perhaps both of us would explode.
Big-browed physicists tell us that two objects cannot under any circumstances occupy the same place at the same time. They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences.
When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.
Assuming that two of me could not coexist without calamity, not charmed by the prospect of exploding, I remained in the archway, watching, until the other Odd Thomas stepped across the threshold into the black room.
You no doubt suppose that upon his departure the time paradox had been resolved and that the crisis described by those doomsaying scientists was at an end, but your optimism is a result of the fact that you are happy in your world of the five standard senses. You are not, as I am, compelled to action by a paranormal talent that you do not understand and cannot fully control.
Lucky you.
As soon as that Odd Thomas stepped for the first time across the threshold into the lightless chamber, I walked directly to the door that he’d left open behind him. I could not see him, of course, out there in the mysteries of the black room, but I assumed that soon he would turn, look back, and see me—an event that in my experience had already come to pass.
When I judged that he’d spotted the sullen red light and had progressed about twenty paces toward it, when he’d had time to look back and see me standing here, I checked my wristwatch to establish the beginning of this episode, reached into the blackness with my right hand, just to be sure nothing felt different about that strange realm, and then I crossed the threshold once more.
MY GREATEST CONCERN, ASIDE FROM exploding and aside from being late for dinner with Stormy, was that I might find myself caught in a time loop, doomed to follow myself repeatedly through Fungus Man’s house and through the door into the black room, over and over for all of eternity.
I’m not sure that such a thing as a time loop is possible. The average physicist might laugh smugly at my concern and charge me with ignorance. This was my crisis, however, and I felt free to speculate without restraint.
Rest assured that no time loop became established: The remainder of my story will not consist of endless repetitions of the events immediately heretofore described—although there are reasons that I wish it did.
Less hesitant on my second visit to the black room, I strode more boldly, yet with that same queasy-making buoyancy, toward the crimson beacon at the center of the chamber. This mysterious lamp seemed to shed a more ominous light than it had previously, though as before it did not relieve the gloom.
Twice I glanced back toward the open door to the hallway but didn’t see myself on either occasion. Nevertheless, I experienced that sudden gyroscopic spin, as before, and I was again churned out of that strange chamber—
—this time into the hot July afternoon, where I found myself walking out of the shadows under the carport, into sunshine that stabbed like fistfuls of golden needles at my eyes.
I halted, squinted against the glare, and retreated to the gloom.
The profound silence that reigned in the house did not extend beyond those walls. A dog barked lazily in the distance. An old Pontiac with a knocking engine and a squealing fan belt passed in the street.
Certain that I had spent no more than a minute in the black room, I consulted my wristwatch again. Apparently I had been not only cast out of the house but also five or six minutes into the future.
Out in the half-burnt yard and in the bristling weeds along the chain-link fence between this property and the next, cicadas buzzed, buzzed, as though the sunlit portion of the world were plagued by myriad short circuits.
Many questions arose in my mind. None of them concerned either the benefits of a career in tires or the financial strategy by which a twenty-year-old short-order cook might best begin to prepare for his retirement at sixty-five.
I wondered if a man living behind a perpetual half-wit smile, a man incapable of keeping a neat house, a man conflicted enough to split his reading time between skin magazines and romance novels,
