For Joe Lynskey, age 46, second-youngest of twelve children, reality cleaved in two on the last afternoon of the year, in 2024, at the top of the 18th Street entrance to the #1 subway line in New York City. This is where Joe stopped and paused to think about what he wanted to do. It took about five or six seconds, a series of blinks, for him to make up his mind. To start and then finish deliberating over whether he should walk an additional four blocks to catch the express train, the one he’d ridden from his apartment earlier that day, or take the local here, and then make the transfer at 14th Street. The choice he made, the single strand of thought he followed, peeled from the universe of a billion other thoughts he’d already had, might have amounted to nothing. Instead, it opened a portal to another dimension of his existence.
Joe decided to make a run for it. He double-timed down the stairs and could hear the train approaching when he swiped in at the turnstile. He could see its headlights beaming down the tunnel from where he was standing on the platform, waiting to board.
In the other timeline, a fictional deviation constructed in Joe’s mind through replays and what-ifs and might-have-beens, he opted for the express train and the extra four-block stretch that came with it, even though it was cold, and even though it was raining. There, on the last afternoon of the year, in 2024, the heartbeat of his life continued just as it always had, pulsing evenly along before and after he stopped and paused at the top of the 18th Street entrance to the #1 subway line in New York City.