I’m upstairs folding laundry in our bedroom when Colin calls out from downstairs. “Hey, I think you cheated on me!”
I drop his green v-neck mid-fold onto our bed, pause for a couple seconds to collect my thoughts, then step out of the bedroom to holler back down the stairwell, “Come again?”
“Yeah, check it out,” Colin says, so of course I descend the stairs to find him in the living room sprawled out on the sofa, studying his phone with a bemused, difficult-to-discern expression on his face. “I mean, I’m reading between the lines a little bit, but tell me what you think.”
Colin holds eye contact with me when he hands me his phone, and I start reading the texts, which are from me. No blueberry emojis. I have to scroll up a little bit to get to the first of a series of long blocks of texts, which I have to say, is not my typical style.
Colin, I know you’re angry with me. Of course you are. I’d be angry with me too. I just want us to sit down and talk about this like human beings. Can we do that? What happened between me and Ian was stupid and careless. And meaningless. I want to fix this.
I can sense Colin studying my face while I read all of this, and my heart is in my throat, even though I know I technically have nothing to feel bad about.
“Ian’s your coworker, right?” Colin asks. He already knows Ian’s my coworker. They’ve met at least twice, maybe more, at various work happy hours.
I hand Colin his phone back. “No blues,” I say, though of course he already knows that, too.
“Lucky for you,” Colin says, sitting up on the couch now, smirking and conspicuously not breaking eye contact with me. He’s studying my face, trying to detect any lie or slip-up. I know him. I sit down on the couch next to Colin and now we’re both just oddly smiling at each other, but his smile is slightly strained and I’m sure mine is, too. Our smiles are probably masking something else, but we don’t know how to navigate what that something else is, so we’re just sitting here, my hand caressing his knee, smiling idiotically at each other.
When it becomes clear that Colin isn’t going to speak first, I volunteer. “I have never, am not currently, nor do I have any intention of ever cheating on you. In this or any other universe. Especially not with Ian, who, yes, is my coworker, and who I have no feelings for whatsoever. I trust I’m wording this in a way that allows for no wiggle room or any possibility of lying by omission.”
“Paul…” Colin sighs.
I take the phone back from him, hold it up to his face. “No blues. This isn’t me. Okay? I didn’t write any of this, and I certainly didn’t do any of this.”
Colin laughs, “Come on, Paul, I know. I know. You don’t have to get defensive, seriously. I just had to show you. I mean, it’s an insane text to get, right?”
I give the phone back, again. “It’s definitely a curveball.”
“Do you want to read the rest of it?” Colin asks.
“I honestly don’t,” I say, and mean it. It’s so odd, this phantom guilt I have no responsibility for, visited upon me from some other place.
“Got it. I love you. Stay away from Ian,” Colin says.
“I love you, too,” I say, and then go back upstairs to finish the laundry.
****
Ten months ago I received a text from Colin saying that he didn’t feel like cooking that night and would it be okay if he just picked up food from Angela’s Ristorante on the way home from work. I texted back that that sounded great to me, and a few hours later arrived home to find Colin in the kitchen making stir fry. I asked him what happened to takeout from Angela’s, and he said he had no clue what I was talking about. I showed him his text, and he immediately freaked out, claimed he’d never texted that. As proof, he showed me his phone where, sure enough, there was no text about grabbing dinner at Angela’s. Furthermore, he claimed, he had always intended to cook stir fry that night (it was in our weekly meal plan, he reminded me), and never even entertained the possibility of getting take-out from Angela’s or anywhere else.
The following weeks brought similar misunderstandings over texts — Colin responding “I love you, too” to a text I’d never sent, me securing expensive tickets to a concert per a request from Colin he later swore he had no interest in, Colin receiving a text from me saying how great he was the previous evening when we’d not had sex, and so forth.
And then word started getting out. We were not the only people being subject to these ongoing text misunderstandings. People around the world began reporting text messages — coined mis-texts — from people in their contacts who later claimed to have never sent them. The crossed signals were strange, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always a mystery. The prevailing wisdom at first was that this was the work of Russian or Chinese hackers, but both countries began experiencing their own widespread mis-texts. And the mis-texts often contained intimate, private details that no hacker could know. Nuanced and personal syntax that no current AI system could mimic.
As the months went on and the mis-texts affected more and more cell phone users, a new improbable but compelling theory took hold: That these were texts from a parallel universe, maybe multiple or infinite parallel universes, ones with mundane or significant differences from our own. Including the occasional parallel world completely identical to ours except maybe you didn’t feel like cooking that night and just wanted to warm up some eggplant parmesan instead.
The texts only ever went one way. We could receive the random, lost texts from other realms, but we could never send ours to them (as far as we knew.) And it quickly wreaked chaos on how we communicate, and how much we could trust what was being communicated to us.
While physicists on television hypothesized and mathematicians waxed poetic about probabilities and multi-verses, and while telephone companies worked around the clock to repair whatever glitch in cellphone services (or the universe) had caused these mis-texts to occur in the first place, people developed codes to let their friends and family know when a text was actually from them. The them in this universe. Colin and I prefaced each text we sent each other with an emoji we were incredibly unlikely to use in any other alternate reality: blueberries. It gave us a way of ensuring we were communicating with the real us, even when we were fielding the occasional errant text that may or may not be from the Paul or Colin of another world.
****
I’m in my office’s kitchen the next day, heating up soup in the microwave, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a text from Colin.
Apparently it was an affair that’d been going on for MONTHS. If you even care…
Colin’s included a screenshot of a blueberry-less text from me, another long paragraph block, but I only make it a few words before texting him back.
Hey sorry, I don’t want to read these.
Suddenly someone walks up behind me and says “Hi” and I immediately recognize Ian’s voice. I spin around to face him, and wonder if there’s any way he saw the text on my phone.
I can’t help but study Ian closely, after the events of the past 24 hours. He’s cute, admittedly, smartly dressed and clean-shaven. Bisexual (I think) and originally from Chicago. It occurs to me that that’s literally the sum total of everything I know about Ian, and I’m mystified as to how or when an affair between the two of us would even begin, and what series of events or circumstances would have to unfold to allow such a thing. I sense no spark between us, no tremor of feeling. Ian is someone I would feel comfortable dismissing outright as “a nice enough guy.”
“All good?” Ian asks, and I realize the microwave has already dinged, and I’m just staring awkwardly at him while we stand there.
“Yeah, sorry,” I open the microwave and grab the bowl too quickly, spilling hot soup over the edge and onto my hand. I yelp in surprise and Ian lightly touches my arm and sympathetically says “Ouch!” I recoil from him, and then immediately feel foolish, not meaning to offend him, or subconsciously hold him accountable for something he didn’t do. He takes a step back and gives me a strange look before saying “Maybe run it under cool water,” which I want to do but instead I just say “Thanks” and quickly leave the kitchen with my bowl, my hand growing more red and tender.
When I return to my desk I have another text from Colin.
Got it.
****
I get home from work around 6:30, walk through the front door, and put my messenger bag on the chair. I’m surprised to see Colin not in the kitchen where he usually is at this time, but on the couch. He’s sitting crouched over with his elbows on his knees, and holding his phone with both hands. He looks pale.
“Are you alright?” I ask him, but he doesn’t respond at first, just gently vibrates his heels up and down, clearly nervous, maybe panicking. Then he sets his phone down on the couch, and finally looks at me.
“I, uh, got some bad texts from Sheila,” he says, barely above a whisper. Sheila is Colin’s sister.
“Is she okay? Are they still coming tomorrow?” Sheila and her 3-year-old daughter Coraline were supposed to fly in from San Diego tomorrow to stay with us for a few days. Colin’s been looking forward to it for months.
“As far as I know, yeah. No checks.” And then he hands me his phone, slowly, begrudgingly, like he’s not sure he wants to part ways with it, and I sit down next to him to read.
Colin and Sheila use yellow checkmarks for their code, but the texts I’m looking at are short and frantic, no yellow checkmarks.
Colin, I love you so much. I need you to know that
Are you drinking again?
I don’t know what happened between you and Paul or why you hurt him, but the police are looking for you
You have to turn yourself in
There’s a path out of this, but you have to take responsibility for it
I can be there tomorrow. I can help you do this
Please Colin, I am still here for you
There’s more but I can’t read it through my blurring and shaky vision. My breathing is suddenly shallow and I feel like I’m going to pass out. Colin has buried his face in his hands, completely still, and I have to nudge him back to life. He turns to look at me, red eyes welling with tears, and he looks simultaneously on the verge of a nervous breakdown and completely drained of life.
“I honestly don’t know who these people are,” Colin says. “Do you?”
“Nobody knows why we get these,” I say. “I mean the scientists have their theories but nobody knows anything for sure.”
“Paul, please listen to me. I have never laid a hand on anyone in my life. I would never, ever do that, not in a million years, no matter what you did, even though they’re not the same thing at all, I know that. I just… I don’t know what this is,” Colin says, gesturing at his phone.
“I know you would never,” I start, “Even if I — and I would never — even if…” I trail off, suddenly incapable of finishing a sentence. Colin is just rocking his head up and down.
“And yet, we could,” he says. “Right? Isn’t that what this means? Isn’t it all just…” he waves his arms at everything and nothing. “Probabilities?”
“But you didn’t. And I didn’t. And we wouldn’t because that’s a decision we get to make. The Colin and Paul sitting together on this couch right now. Maybe there’s one universe in a billion where I do that, and there’s one universe in a billion where you do that, but… if we know that one-in-a-billion universe already exists out there, doesn’t that mean we’re in the clear?” But it doesn’t feel like we’re in the clear. How could we ever know for sure? But I can’t bring myself to say this out loud.
For a long while we just sit there together stewing in the insanity of this, intermittently looking at each other, maybe trying to find any semblance of a cheater, a fraud, a monster. But I only see Colin. And then I start laughing. At first it feels jarring, wrong and gross under the circumstances, but I can’t control it, and then Colin starts laughing too, and then we’re both just losing it, and I don’t know why. I think we don’t know what else to do. We kiss each other’s mouths, I kiss his neck. I fold Colin — my Colin — into my arms, I never want to let him go. We talk about possibilities, our futures, all the things we want to do, all the places we want to go, all the people we’re committed to being for each other. And then eventually we just fall asleep there on the couch, completely exhausted, without dinner.
****
I remove the hands from my face and say “Peek-a-boo!” and Coraline once again starts giggling like a maniac. I have no idea how long we’ve been doing this. Sheila is pouring herself another glass of wine in the kitchen. “She’s a little old for peek-a-boo, Paul,” she says, and I point at Coraline and say “Well clearly she’s not” and then I cover my face up again, hold it for a few seconds, and then unfold my hands to reveal someone new. Coraline starts howling.
My eyes lock with Colin’s who’s drying and putting away the dishes I cleaned in the kitchen. He makes a funny face at me, and I stick my tongue out at him. I pick Coraline up in my arms and put her on my shoulders, then fall back, and offload her onto the couch. She asks to do it again. We do. She asks to do it one more time. We do.
Sheila says “Ok Cor, time to get ready for bed,” and of course Coraline immediately protests, starts begging for just 5 more minutes. Colin hangs the dishtowel up and says “If we do monster outside for 5 minutes, do you promise you’ll do bedtime with Mama without fussing?” and Coraline promises that she will. So Colin makes a scary face and growls and chases Coraline shrieking out the back door, into our yard. Sheila goes upstairs to ready the guest bedroom, and I walk over to the window to watch Colin chase Coraline around.
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I check it. A text from Colin. No blueberries.
Please forgive me
I put the phone back, and Coraline is running harder than I’ve ever seen her, a last burst of energy before sleep and dreams. Colin is in his element when he’s with her. I think my heart could burst.
Again my phone buzzes. Again I pull it out.
Please forgive me
I set it on the counter while I watch them chasing dusk into nightfall in circles around the narrow yard. My phone keeps buzzing, filling up line after line on the bright screen.
Forgive me
Forgive me
Forgive me
I close my eyes and open them. I watch the man I’m sharing this universe with chasing after his niece, laughing, shouting, spilling their love in long shadows across the grass.
Forgive me
Forgive me
Forgive me