Multiversum (30 page)

After dinner, Giovanni and Agnese made coffee. As if nothing were wrong, in spite of what the old man had said about the war. Ada, the old man's wife, stayed in her armchair the whole time, refusing to eat, a gentle, resigned smile stamped on her face.

Before serving coffee, Agnese called the two boys and accompanied them upstairs. Jenny had just come out of the bathroom and, through the half-open door of the two brothers' bedroom, she saw the woman lean forward and tuck them in.

‘Goodnight, my little angels,' she whispered before kissing them on the forehead. Jenny turned away and started back into her room when a drawing on their bedroom door stopped her in her tracks. It was a rudimentary sketch of every member of the family. At the bottom was written
We love you.
Next to that were the signatures of the two boys. As she choked back her tears, she visualised Alex's apocalyptic drawing, a reminder of the fate that awaited the human race.

It was the last night for them all. It was the eve of the world's end.

‘Goodnight, kids. Agnese will show you to the guest bedroom.' Carlo flashed them a smile, and Alex and Jenny smiled back.

‘They're going to invade us tomorrow, I can feel it …' said the grandfather, both elbows propped on the table and his gaze lost in the distance.

Agnese led them to a bedroom, then bid them goodnight and disappeared.

Alex and Jenny shut the door behind them.

In front of them, there was a king-size bed with a rolled-up brown blanket serving as a pillow, and a white feather quilt covering the mattress. A large wardrobe on the other side of the room was so tall that it almost grazed the ceiling. All around them, on the walls, vintage fountain pens were displayed in small frames.

Jenny sat down on the edge of the bed, turned her back to Alex, and said nothing as he took off his sweater, folded it, and placed it on a chair next to the door. Beside her was a window with the blinds shut tight.

Shouts seemed to filter in from the road outside. Perhaps some people had decided to break the curfew. Perhaps someone else had decided to go out and loot stores to find food.

‘It's cold,' said Jenny in a small voice.

Alex placed his hands on the cold metal of one of the radiators. ‘Have you ever thought about it?'

‘About what?' Jenny replied, without turning around.

‘About all this. A home, a family, children of your own. A normal life …'

Jenny looked up and smiled, with a sigh. ‘I don't know … yes, maybe. Turn off the light.'

Alex flipped the switch by the door, and went over to the other side of the bed to peer through the gaps between the slats of the wooden blind.

Meanwhile, Jenny stood up and took off the woollen sweater that Agnese had given her, followed by her pants.

When he turned around, she was in a singlet and underpants. The silhouette of her body blurred into the darkness.

‘You'll see, everything will turn out fine,' Alex said to her, betraying some uncertainty, as he put his hands on Jenny's waist, making her shiver. ‘We'll find this Memoria.'

‘But what if this is our last night on Earth?'

Jenny placed her hands on Alex's, then she guided them behind her back. They drew closer, shyly, timidly, in complete darkness.

When their bodies were only centimetres apart, Alex tilted his head to one side and his lips met Jenny's. They kissed softly, while his hands slid up her back until his fingers were lost in her hair.

‘Do you think that this is our last night together?' Alex asked, moving away slightly.

She said nothing, sat on the edge of the hard mattress, and lay down, sinking her head into the rolled-up blanket.

Alex placed his knees on the edge of the bed and let himself slide forward, placing his forearms just inches from Jenny's shoulders. He brushed his lips over her forehead, her nose, and her cheeks, and then he kissed her again.

More shouts rang out from the street, followed by gunfire. From further away came the crackling voice of a loudspeaker. The chaos in the distance had already become the soundtrack to that moment.

They rolled around on the bed for a while as Jenny's breasts, still covered by her singlet, pressed against Alex's chest, and the triskelion, icy cold, dangled from her neck.

Jenny got on top of him and took off her singlet. Alex reached around and grabbed the blanket behind his head, unrolled it, and spread it around her shoulders, creating a small tent around them both. They hid underneath that blanket and went on kissing, separated from the rest of the world. They took off all their clothes and lay there for a brief instant without moving, their breathing merging until it was a single breath, their thoughts merging into a single thought.

An instant later, they were sitting hand in hand in the Planetarium, with the light-blue ceiling overhead.

They couldn't have been any older than four. Jenny's mother had come back to Italy to see her parents, in Rome. Her grandfather had arranged to take his daughter and granddaughter to spend a day in Milan, where they'd visited the Castello Sforzesco, the Navigli, and the Duomo. They'd gone to the Planetarium, too, practically stumbling across the domed building by accident, inside the public gardens of Porta Venezia. They'd stood in line. Right in front of them were Giorgio and Valeria Loria, with little Alex. When they went in, the two children found themselves sitting side by side. On the armrests, their fingers brushed against each other for the first time, and, with childish innocence, they joined hands. They sat there holding hands for the whole show.

For a few moments, the memory of that afternoon from so many years ago dragged them far away, into the past, without their being able to tell dream from reality.

When they opened their eyes again, they were locked in an embrace, wrapped in the soft, warm quilt.

They made love, just like they'd always dreamed of doing. For the first and perhaps the last time. If anyone could have seen the town from high above, they would have noticed a blinding light shining from that very house. But there was nothing in the sky overhead but an enormous asteroid hurtling towards the Earth's surface.

They fell asleep under the blanket, arms wrapped around each other, and slept that way through the night, while outside the house, the shouts and gunshots continued to multiply.

It was the last night before the end of the world.

36

When Jenny forced open her eyes, the room was still shrouded in darkness.

She couldn't say what time it was, or how long she and Alex had slept. She got up and peered through the cracks in the shutters, but all she could see was a dense blanket of fog engulfing the countryside around the little town.

That was wonderful
, thought Alex, his eyes still half open, as he looked at Jenny's body in front of the window, her back to him.

It was for me
,
too
, she replied in her thoughts and then turned around. She sat down on the edge of the bed and placed a hand on his chest.

‘What's going on outside?'

‘There's only a very thick fog. Maybe we should go downstairs.'

Alex stood up and realised the muscles in his legs had been asleep, and were now tingling with pins and needles. He picked up his clothes and got dressed. Jenny did the same. Both of them knew very well what was about to happen outside that room, but their thoughts were still clinging to what had happened inside it the night before.

A few minutes later, Alex gave Jenny a kiss on the forehead and opened the door.

They slowly crept downstairs, as if afraid of waking someone up. They heard no noises, no voices, only an unexpected smell that tickled their nostrils when they were halfway down the stairs.

‘Don't you smell something burning?' Alex whispered.

‘Yes, it almost smells like …' Jenny looked up, but immediately dismissed the thought that had formed in her head. ‘Let's go see.'

They made their way down a short hallway, went past a bathroom and a laundry closet, then they glimpsed the orange tiles of the kitchen and tiptoed on.

What happened in the instant after she walked into the kitchen froze her blood in her veins and rooted her to the spot. Behind her, Alex saw her lurch to a halt as if she'd suddenly glimpsed the edge of a cliff.

‘Oh dear, I must have burned the roast, heavens …' said Clara Graver as she turned around. Wearing an apron, and oven mitts on her hands, she was pulling a roasting pan out of the oven, a sad expression on her face. ‘I told you to come help me.'

Mum, what are you doing here?
thought Jenny without managing to get a word out. Her voice choked in her throat, as if someone had yanked a rope around her neck.

Alex took a few steps forward, but no sooner was he able to take a look at the scene than he was distracted by the sound of footsteps behind him.

‘Hey, man …' said a familiar voice from the other end of the corridor. ‘I cracked another database last night. You wouldn't have believed it, a memorable job.'

Alex swung around and saw him, standing right there.

Standing on his own two feet, his own two
legs
, his face glowing with a brilliant smile and his arms extended as if waiting for a hug.

‘Marco …'

Jenny stepped back in horror. Now she was standing next to Alex.

‘What's going on here? Are we dreaming?' she asked. Her hands were icy cold, and she was trembling from head to toe.

Alex didn't know what to say, and in the meantime both Clara and Marco went on staring at the two of them.

‘Hey, man,' Marco continued, ‘does it strike you that it's getting kind of hot in here?'

Alex took Jenny in his arms and held her close, against his chest, to distract her from the scene before them. Marco's body was being swallowed by flames, and charred into embers. There was a dopey grin stamped on his face, even as ribbons of skin and flesh tore away from his body and fell to the floor.

‘No!' shouted Alex as Jenny wrenched herself from his grip. The same thing was happening in the kitchen. The roasting pan fell out of Clara's hands as her apron caught fire and she became engulfed in flames.

Jenny remained paralysed. A knot in her throat kept her from speaking. She raised one hand to her mouth, and reached out to Alex with the other.

‘Tell me this is a nightmare, please …' she mumbled as she stared down at the ashes piled up on the kitchen floor.

‘This is what's going to happen in a few hours,' said a hoarse voice somewhere behind them, in the distance. Alex and Jenny turned, but the corridor was empty. They went down the hallway, stepping around what was left of Marco. When they reached the front hall, the voice started speaking again, closer this time: ‘That's the end in store for everyone, as soon as the asteroid hits the Earth's atmosphere.'

Alex gripped Jenny's hand hard and walked towards the dining room in the basement, which was where the voice seemed to be coming from.

When they walked in, there was no longer an elderly woman sitting next to the fireplace, as there had been the previous night.

‘Pleased to meet you kids. My name is Thomas Becker.'

Sitting with his legs crossed, and a notebook and a pencil in his hands, he looked like an elderly retired professor. The faint light from the lamp reflected off his bald head. His hollow cheeks and his lined forehead made him look at least eighty. His voice was deep and warm, with the complex, fascinating tones of a consummate actor.

‘I have some answers, yes, but not all of them,' said the man. ‘The most important one you're going to have to find for yourselves.'

‘But you …' Alex tried to reply.

‘When I first enrolled at Dortmund University, many, many years ago, I decided to major in astrophysics. My father wanted me to be a lawyer instead, and I remained unsure what to do until it was almost too late. Then I made up my mind to do what I wanted instead of what he wanted.'

Jenny frowned. These certainly weren't the answers she was looking for.

‘Two years later, during a lecture, we heard shots outside the auditorium. A young student had just murdered a classmate. It was front-page news. I had stayed inside, even though the temptation to stick my head out and see what was happening was very strong.'

‘Just what does that mean?' Alex interrupted him.

‘Listen closely!' Becker coughed and slapped his hand on the notepad. ‘A few years after that I refused to propose to a woman I could have married. Kirsten was beautiful and intelligent, but I was too absorbed in my studies to listen to her.'

‘Why are you telling us these things?' Jenny burst out. ‘Where are we and what's going on?'

‘The world is ending, haven't you noticed?' Becker looked around, and as soon as the two of them took their eyes off him, they realised that they were no longer in a basement.

All around them was nothing but an expanse of deserted, ice-covered land.