![]() ![]() Since I’d already been drinking for a while, I took the opportunity to check in and register. The registration line thinned as a programmed cocktail hour began in some lounge somewhere. ![]() One Braid and I both reached for our beers. ‘This Is So Damn Weird: Strategies for Navigating SarahCon Without Losing Your Mind.’” Mabel, my friends and neighbors, the coffee shop up the street. I pictured our little house bucking and buckling, our yard splitting down the middle. “I never got out west myself, so it wasn’t a personal thing for me, but it was horrible. “Our Seattle was destroyed in an earthquake.” ![]() Older Sarah chugged her beer and waved for another before turning back to us. “Ballard.” I raised my glass to clink hers, though that particular girlfriend and I hadn’t lasted. “Same! Summer job, then I met my girlfriend and settled for good. I went out for a job after college and stayed.” “I’m from all over the place,” One Braid said. ![]() Where are you from? I mean, answer however you want.” I don’t think it’s a real field of study where I’m from.” One Braid scratched the back of her neck. “It looks like there are four other quantologist Sarahs on the host committee.” Never had the guts to cut my hair that short, either. I had never been anything approaching elegant. She looked harried but better put together than most of us, elegant in a silk blouse and designer jeans that fit and flattered. Her hair was pixie-short, defeating the frizz that plagued me. We followed her pointing finger to a Sarah bustling through the lobby, walkie-talkie to her lips. She’s been rushing back and forth as long as I’ve been sitting here.” She is a quantologist at Johns Hopkins University.’” She looked up. “’Sarah Pinsker ’-I don’t know what ‘R-0-D-0’ means-‘made the discovery creating the multiverse portal. She turned to a bio page and started reading. Older Sarah rummaged in a SarahCon commemorative tote bag and pulled out a program. I checked into my room but I haven’t braved convention registration yet. “I’m sure she’ll tell us the numbers in her opening address.” I’d always wondered if I’d still be me if they hadn’t waited. My parents were married years before they had me. You could ask someone at registration.”Ī third Sarah, maybe a decade older than me, joined our conversation. Do you know how many there are altogether? How many of us here, I mean.” I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. I’d worn mine that way when I was thirteen. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. “You can put her drink on my tab,” said the me next to me. We both put our glasses down at the same time. You all go for the stout or one of the good whiskeys.” “The stout,” I said when I caught the bartender’s attention, pointing at the third tap handle. Space was tight amid the other suitcases and backpacks. I found a barstool and shoved my suitcase and backpack under my feet. A third faction, which I decided to join, had adjourned to the lobby bar, hoping to use alcohol to blunt the weirdness of coming face to face with our multiverse selves. Large groups gathered around the hotel check-in desk and SarahCon registration, no doubt trying to pick themselves off the long lists of near-identical names. Stranger even than that, an energy in the air that I couldn’t quite explain, a feeling that every single Sarah had stepped through to the exact same thought, to the same curious-amazement-horror-wonder, to the same rug-yanking confirmation that the invitation had been real and we were no longer alone, or maybe we were more alone than we had ever been. My body and face, even my expression, reflected back at me in two hundred funhouse mirrors. We were the ones planted in the lobby, bags in hand, eyes wide and mouth open. It was easy to tell who had just arrived. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. And you’ve never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly.” “Either you’ll be part of a ground-breaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?” “How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. She listened, made suggestions I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. An invitation like that would never come again. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. ![]()
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