Universal transport

You can find Martin on Facebook @MartinHeavisides and through his blog, theevitable.blogspot.com

One day in 1975—it could have been a year earlier but not a year later, because by then I’d relocated to Toronto (the year Taxi Driver came out, which I saw in Toronto not Saskatoon)—I was driving between Saskatoon and Outlook, just past the bend in the road where Mount Blackstrap (sometimes called Mount Chimo), the artificial skiing mountain which resembled a rounded breast with a clutter of ski runs and resort buildings that clustered at the top as a nipple, when I saw—the highway one straight stretch for miles-- an approaching convoy of military vehicles straddling both halves of the two-lane. First was a colossal artillery gun mounted on a flatbed truck the length of a football field perhaps, half of it in the right, half in the left lane, followed by three half tracks, one to the left, one straddling the median line, one to the right of the highway divider. Followed by two tanks on either side, and two more and another two. Behind them a row of six jeeps straddled the entire highway. The procession went on for some distance behind these, but I couldn’t make out any detail on vehicles further back. I did see just the tip peaking up, miles back, of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that must be riding on a flatbed truck similar to the one that headed this convoy.

I remember thinking for an instant that this was somehow plausible—I’d seen two privates in camouflage khaki purchasing chocolate bars in the store annexed to the gas station I stopped at on the outskirts of the city. I blinked twice and rubbed my eyes, but they didn’t go away. I thought they must be on manoeuvres somewhere nearby, maybe in a scrub area that we sometimes refer to optimistically as a wood. Did that make a military convoy stretching further back into the distance than I could see even across the flatness of a prairie road, plausible even at a less-travelled hour like this, when you mightn’t see a car once every half hour? It did not, and so after a hesitation, I put my foot down slightly on the pedal to accelerate into the hallucination. Since I’m alive to tell the tale, it’s apparent I guessed right. It didn’t vanish all at once, but bit by bit like floating foam and then an implosion of colour. When I’d driven into the dissolving ICBM a car roared by on the other side, the first I’d seen in, oh, three quarters of an hour. A civilian vehicle, which I could tell (by the driver’s one finger salute in passing) was real.

I don’t know if I’d encountered alternate universe theory then, but I’ve certainly thought many times since that there must have been another me, somewhere, that accelerated into that procession and was instantly killed (though I suppose a near-fatal accident and prolonged coma would also have been a possibility, hence a certainty if alternate universes are created at the instant of any decision. With who knows what legal repercussions? Not to mention one where I pulled over to the shoulder—not a dangerous manoeuvre on a prairie road—and looked on with a sheepish grin as the whole convoy popped out of view or, as it actually had done at the time, vanished vehicle by vehicle, approaching line by approaching line.)

This was only one decision in my life, albeit rather dramatic, and according to the theory—some versions of it at least—every decision each of us makes, mundane, life changing, life threatening, each one brings a new universe into being in which we made the other choice (assuming there was a single other choice we might have made, rather than, as is often the case, a plenitude of them). Think about it a moment. With nearly eight billion of us alive at this time (here where I drove safely into the convoy; the numbers may be different in other universes), each of whom, many times a day, makes a decision of some kind—that is one massive load of constantly generating universes. Wouldn’t it make sense to merge some of them at least if they were compatible? Otherwise you’d have trillions in any given week, without considering the universes brought into being by the new people in the new universe, in all the new universes, all busy making decisions and thus multiplying variant existences further. When I drove straight into the mirage, did that not make it a real convoy in some other universe that a version of me drove straight into, with the same confidence and surety, to his death? (Or hers. I might not be a man in every universe. I wasn’t expected to be one in this one, as my mother tells it, and with no ultrasound to warn them, I was a surprise—ultimately a welcome one—when I popped out male.) Were hundreds, thousands of universes generated that made innumerable convoys a vision unfortunately real, killing enough of me to make me a mass murderer in spite of not having killed a single other person in the whole of my life in this universe? A mass suicide more accurately, and if you can’t legitimately kill yourself who can you kill? I’m not too worried about it in any case. It’s only an hypothesis, and at that one Occam’s Razor seems custom designed to sever.

I wonder about a version of this in which the story was told to me, one day when I was hitchhiking out of Saskatoon because I never got my license or learned to drive to this very day. It was a much briefer story in his version, fleshed out as you see. I wonder about me in other universes where I’m not a writer. What do I find to occupy my life?

About the author:

Martin Heavisides has published in FRiGG, Mad Hatter’s Review, Feast of Laughter, The Linnet’s Wings, and numerous other journals of discerning taste. His play Empty Bowl was published in The Linnet’s Wings and given a live staged reading at Living Theatre, New York. Another play, CSI Grandma’s House, has had a Zoom production with Quarantine Players.

The Gap by W. T. Horton (1898)