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I follow the man’s directions to the Empire State Building. It takes about a quarter of an hour, then I’m standing in front of the main entrance. It would be cool to go inside and get a lift to the top, but I don’t want to waste time, so I look for the yellow, spire-topped borehole.
I find it to one side of the doors, in the window of a pharmacy. It’s like it’s been built into the glass. I step through, expecting to wind up in the Merge, but to my consternation I find myself inside the pharmacy. There’s a wide vine ahead of me, but shelves stacked with tubes and bottles all around, and lots of people shopping.
“What the hell?” I grunt.
Nobody jumps or looks at me. It seems like I’m invisible again.
The vine is unlike any I’ve seen before. It’s as if the top half has been crunched down into the lower half, giving the vine the appearance of a long, U-shaped tube, a bit like a curved water slide. It starts in the middle of the aisle and slopes upwards, cutting through a shelf of vitamins. As I watch, a woman reaches for a box of pills. Her hand passes through the vine, her fingers close around the box, and she lifts it off the shelf.
“This is too weird,” I mutter. Vines in the Merge are one thing, but vines in the Born, running through shelves, are another thing entirely.
I step forward – a woman and her child automatically edge out of my way – and reach for the vine. My hands don’t pass through it. Instead my fingers tighten on the two sides and I step on. I look up and see the vine climbing into the ceiling. I’ve a sneaky feeling that the ceiling isn’t as solid as it seems.
I haul myself along. I probably don’t need to use my hands – it’s not that steep – but I’m not going to let go until I’m sure of my footing.
As I’m crawling upwards, one of the men who works in the store moves beneath me. He bends to avoid my legs, almost doubling over, but his head passes through the vine. I can’t understand how the vine is mist-like for them but firm for me.
“It’s just a Merge thing,” I tell myself, trying to sound like Inez would if she was here. “Space is different, yada yada.”
I smile. I might not be able to understand this, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it. Warming to the task, I crawl forward another few metres, stopping when my forehead comes to a rest just below the ceiling.
I push my left hand up and my fingers disappear into the panels, as I thought they would. I leave them there a moment, then pull my hand back and flex my fingers — they’re all present and correct. “Of course they are,” I snort, then push through the ceiling of the pharmacy and carry on up.
The vine twists its way upwards through offices, corridors, toilets (I close my eyes), cupboards and more. It winds forwards and backwards, all over the building.
At one point it pokes through a wall and I find myself outside. I’m high off the ground – I must be thirty or forty storeys up – so I hunch over, afraid the wind will rip me loose. Then I frown. There isn’t any wind. Instead there’s a lifelessness to the air that’s familiar from my time in the Merge.
I wish Inez was here to explain this, but she isn’t, so I just carry on as the vine leads me back into the building and through more rooms and offices. The vine cuts through walls, floors, desks, chairs, pipes, toilet seats. It can overlap just about anything, and while I’m on it, I overlap those objects too, my limbs sliding through solids as if they were made of fog.
Thirty or forty floors later, the vine slices through a wall and I’m outside again, looking over the city. It’s a spectacular sight, but it’s not the view of New York that makes me freeze and hold my breath.
It’s the view of the other cities.
Impossibly, I’m not just looking at the Manhattan skyline. Dotted in among the local skyscrapers are landmarks from other countries, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin.
I turn in a daze and there’s the Sydney Opera House standing close to an ancient Egyptian pyramid. The Tower of Pisa is leaning off to my left. More pyramids on my right, but these look like the ones they have in Mexico. There’s the hill from Rio with the large statue of Christ with his arms outstretched. The huge skyscraper that Dubai is famous for.
There are more, landmarks I recognise and some I don’t, but all alien to the New York setting, connected by a network of foot vines like the one I’m frozen to.
Weird is one thing. I’ve adjusted to weird over the last couple of days. Me and weird have learnt to get along pretty well.
But this, on my own world, where I thought I would be returning to normal... This is too much for me.
I sit, staring at the fantastical vista like a baby in a pram, no words to express what I’m feeling, just a big ball of vacant, slack-jawed wonder adrift in a universe that hasn’t started to make sense yet.
I forget about time, Inez, the Merge, my mission, everything else. There’s just the deliriously delicious spread of famous buildings that can’t be here but are, and I gaze at them in silent wonder, waiting for my brain to melt.
When it doesn’t, my senses begin to return.
“O,” I wheeze. Then, a while later, I add, “K.”
I push myself to my feet and look around. This is the Merge but also the Born. The spheres are overlapping, the way the vine overlapped with objects in the building. I don’t know how that can be, but it is, so it’s time to quit being dazed and just deal with it.
I focus, looking for the clock tower that Inez mentioned, and spot it immediately. I should have guessed. In a sea of famous landmarks, what’s the most recognisable clock in all the world?
“Big Ben strikes ten,” I sing solemnly, “ding-dong, ding-dong.”
London’s renowned clock tower lies ahead of me in the distance. It looks the same as it did when I was studying it a couple of days ago from the bridge over the Thames, the Houses of Parliament just behind it, the London Eye...
No. I was going to say the London Eye just across the river, but the Eye isn’t part of the landscape. And now that I do a double take, I realise the Houses of Parliament aren’t there either — the clock tower stands alone.
The foot vine stretches out, unsupported by any pillars, snaking through the air. It branches off in lots of places, arms leading towards the global landmarks, bending over and under other vines that lie in its way.
I glance back at the Empire State Building, worried it will disappear if I move away. I have a route back to the Born through this, but if I move on and the passageway to New York vanishes, maybe I’ll be stuck up here forever, lost in the clouds of a most unique wonderland.
No. Inez told me I’d be able to return to the Born after delivering my message, and also that I’d be close to where I lived. There must be another vine like this one, running down Big Ben. George and Rachel are in London, worrying and waiting for me to return, and this unlikeliest of routes is going to deliver me straight to them.
“Come on,” I sigh, taking my first step forward. “Time to go home.”