Page 31 of Alone With You in the Ether

“What, me being petty?”

“No, the idea of you being doting.”

“I don’t dote,” she said with an audible grimace. “I just think the trick with children is to treat them like adults.”

“How do you treat most adults?”

Silence.

“Probably poorly. So maybe you have a point.”

He smiled.

“So,” she said. “Got any more hexagon things?”

He thought about it. “There’s some Babylonian stuff.”

“God, of course there is,” she said with a laugh. “What Babylonian stuff?”

“Well, the Babylonians were very into astronomy. They gave us our current concept of time. And circles,” he added. “They did everything in units of sixty. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour—”

“There’s that six again.”

“Exactly,” he said. “So we really only see time the way they intended us to see it, which suggests there might be another way to see it.”

“Which would be?”

“Well, quantum theory seems to indicate a multiverse,” he said. “Where all times and possibilities and outcomes exist in tandem.”

“In hexagons?”

“Probably. Maybe.” A shrug. “But we can’t actually identify the shape of the multiverse, seeing as we don’t know which universe we exist in ourselves.”

“Why try to solve time travel instead of multiverse travel?”

“Well, the idea of the multiverse is that you wouldn’t travel,” he said. “You exist in all things at all times, so in terms of it being something you could actuallyexperience, then—”

“Oh, hi,” she said, clearly speaking to someone who wasn’t him. “Sorry, did you need to…?”

Aldo quieted, listening to the male voice on the other end.

“Yeah, no I was… I couldn’t sleep, so—yeah. Sorry,” she said, this time to Aldo. “One second—no, it’s fine, I’ll just… yeah, okay, go ahead.”

He heard the sound of her leaving wherever she’d been.

“Sorry,” she said. “Marc needed to use the bathroom.”

“You were in the bathroom?”

“Yeah, well, you know. It has a door. I was sitting in the bathtub.”

Briefly, Aldo was reminded of Audrey Hepburn in the claw-footed bathtub couch inBreakfast at Tiffany’s.

“That can’t have been comfortable,” he remarked.

“Well, it’s fine, I’m gone now. What were we saying? Babylonians? No—time travel.”

“Both, I guess.”

---