The P&A

The road was beyond slippery. The anti-skids on the car went in and out of activating. The duel between chaos and control continued for a few long, bad minutes. And then I took a turn for the worse.

I say “I," but that’s not quite right. I was in the car all right and the driver’s seat, but I wasn’t actually driving. My console was. Or whatever it was that housed the AI brains of this car.

The AI was sharp all right, brilliant, or at very least a far better driver than I. But it couldn't see into the future. It could not see what was just around the bend.

***

The Taconic Parkway south of Route 84 was an ordeal on the best of days. It could be tough to drive at the end of a sunny day with not a drop of rain in the sky. But most drivers handle it ok, and only an AI system that was flat-out buggy or burned out would fail to live up to its promise to keep the driver safe and the car untouched even on the Taconic. Indeed, even on a Taconic with heavy wind and rain.

But this moment was different. The raindrops were thick and splashy – fast, constant, and practically horizontal. The wind was harrowing and howling. But it wasn't the sound that got my brand new Prius. It was an unpredictable, savage gust.

I have no idea how much my car weighs. When it comes to cars, I'm the kind of guy who just drives and doesn't care what makes it work. Same for the digital brains inside. And, yeah, they worked this day.

I don't know what happened first. Probably both at the same time. Those locust trees with their shallow root systems should be banned – can a species of tree be banned? – or at least not allowed near highways. I saw them all over Route 6 on Cape Cod after one of the big hurricanes. Took a month of work to put in all the repairs. No electricity for almost as long. When the batteries went, my folks used oil lamps. There was something romantic about this, my father told my mother. She and I didn't agree at all.

There was definitely nothing romantic about the gust from hell that lifted my Prius off the ground as we went around a sharp curve. I'd been thinking of pulling over but there was no place to stop and an ugly jeep was too close behind me, anyway. The anti-skids couldn't do anything, an odd part of my brain thought, if the car was in the air, right?

They certainly couldn't do anything for the locust tree that had been pulled out of the ground and was also in the air and now headed right towards me. The last thing I thought before the tree and I collided is that the anti-collision AI options of suddenly stopping or swerving wouldn't work, either, couldn't work, with my car in the air.

***

Except I never collided. Not with an uprooted locust tree or anything. One instant the locust was a centimeter, a millimeter, from my windshield. The next instant it wasn't there. My car set down on the wet highway and resumed its anti-skid routine. I didn't think I was dead. No, I knew I was alive, but that's all I felt certain of at that moment.

"Call Raeanne," I pressed the audio a second or longer later and asked it to call my wife. We were living in a rented brownstone on West 93rd Street.

"I'm sorry, please say again," my audio told me.

"Call Raeanne," I said in a firmer voice, then realized I was rasping,

"I'm sorry—"

I cut off the ingratiating audio and tried to calm myself.

"Call Raeanne," I said a few moments later, in what I hope sounded more like my normal voice.

"Calling Raeanne," my audio told me. She did have a nice voice.

So did Raeanne, who answered on the first ring, faster than usual. "Hi honey," she said.

"Hey," I said. "Pretty nasty up here. Had a close call on the road, but I'm ok."

"Oh no! You sure you're ok? It's been sunny and beautiful here all afternoon."

***

The 45-minute drive back to Manhattan was indeed beautiful. The roads were suddenly dry, the sun was high, and I couldn't see so much as a single glistening raindrop on a tree leaf. Summer storms sometimes vanished like that.

I thought about the vanishing tree. It had been so close. I had not only seen it, literally in my face. My body had reacted to it. Every part of my body viscerally insisted that the locust in the windshield had not been my imagination. But that was the only rational explanation I could think of for what had happened, or almost happened…

I got home in time for a not-too-late dinner at 9pm, in our favorite nearby Italian restaurant. I debated with myself through the calamari whether I should tell Raeanne what had happened, or almost had happened, to me. No, seeing an uprooted locust tree approach my windshield at what felt like the speed of light, only to disappear, with anti-collision controls presumably useless was definitely something that had happening to me. But I finally decided not to tell Raeanne, at least not tonight. It could wait until morning, or maybe even longer, maybe until and unless something like that happened to me again. If it was a transitory glitch in my mind, it didn't much matter. If it was something permanent and more profound, well, delaying dealing with it for one day shouldn't make things any worse.

We made love almost as soon as we got back to the apartment. She looked great with her long black hair against her soft smooth skin. She was great in bed, too, doing things she'd never done before.

I was on my back afterward, I guess smiling, and Raeanne nestled her head on my chest. "What are you smiling about?" she asked with a flirtatious laugh. There was something I always especially liked about flirting after sex.

"You were very good tonight," I said.

Raeanne laughed a little louder. "I'm always good," she said, and kissed my neck.

"Yeah, you are," I said. "But I really liked the new thing you did with your tongue."

Now she not only laughed but lifted her head.

I opened my eyes.

Her pretty face was scrunched up like she was trying to make sense of what I'd just said. "I do that all the time, once in a while, don't I? Hey, that's an oxymoron." And she laughed again.

We made love again, too, a little later. It was good, but she didn't do that thing. True to her word – all the time, once in a while.

***

I got up early the next morning, kissed Raeanne softly on her half-asleep face, and sent a text to her phone. I'd decided to go up to my Toyota dealer in Rye – didn't hurt to get my car checked out, given what it and I had just gone through yesterday.

I got in my car, debating whether to call for an appointment or just show up cold. Mike, my usual service rep, was a good guy. Unless the place was packed, he'd take me if I just showed up. If I called for an appointment, he'd likely say they were booked today and offer me an appointment some other day. I decided to show up without an appointment.

But what exactly would I tell Mike I wanted the mechanics to look at? If I told him what had happened, or I thought had happened to me and my car yesterday, he'd think I was out of my mind. Ok, I'd think of something as I was driving up.

I pressed the start button, and for some reason glanced at the odometer. It was over a thousand miles higher than what I was 100% sure it was showing in mileage yesterday – now 11,762 miles in contrast some 10,530 miles – but Bard College, from where I was driving back to New York, was just a little over a hundred miles away. Had my brush with death and/or insanity somehow messed up the odometer, too? Well, at least now I had a reason for showing up at the Toyota service center.

***

Jorge, a foreman with a big friendly smile, greeted me with his customary handshake and his big friendly smile.

"I'm just here to talk to Mike about an odd problem," I said to Jorge. "I don't know if anything needs repair." Or can be repaired, I thought to myself.

"Of course," Jorge said, and pointed to Mike's cubicle. "He seems to be free now, and we'll just move your car out of the way, to the back."

I nodded and approached the cubicle.

Mike was his usual friendly self. "You know you need an appointment, doc, but I'll fit you in," he said. He called me "doc," because he knew I had a PhD. Most professors of sociology do.

"Thanks," I said, sincerely, and told him the problem with the odometer.

"Ok," Mike said, and called up my car records on his computer. He squinted and shook his head. "This keeps track of what your mileage is at all times, and keeps a complete record of that, every time you drive, from the day you bought the car and drove it out of the dealership – you know that, right?"

I nodded.

"Well, it says your car has been over 11,000 miles for the past two weeks."

"Impossible!" I said.

"Well, you thought your odometer was broken, but I'm telling you it's right in synch with what I have on this screen," Mike said.

"Is it possible something in your central system is broken, and it sent out wrong information to my odometer which overrode the actual mileage of the car?"

"You've got quite the imagination, doc!" Mike chuckled. "I don't think that's possible. But— Kate? Got a second, I'd like to ask you a question about the odometer on new Priuses."

A blonde in blue jeans walked over – like someone out of a 1950s song.

"She's our computer expert," Mike said to me. "She knows her stuff."

Kate came over and smiled at us. Mike explained the situation. Kate immediately shook her head. "No, that's not possible," she said.

Mike nodded. "Thanks," he said to her.

She started to walk away—

"Can I tell you something else?" I blurted out.

"Sure," Kate said. Mike offered her a seat.

I told them what had happened to me on the Taconic.

"The anti-collision features wouldn't work if your car was off the ground – that's something our engineers are working on right now," Kate said. "But they're still a ways off."

"Should be in the Prius in three-to-five years," Mike added.

"Right, I figured that was the case, that the feature didn't exist," I said. "But, then, what happened on that road yesterday?"

"You say the tree-limb just disappeared?" Kate asked.

"The whole tree," I said.

"You have too much to drink at lunch?" Mike asked, with a wink.

"I had nothing to drink at lunch, except Poland Spring," I replied.

Kate closed her eyes, as if she was thinking hard about something. "I just remembered – my sister was driving back from Albany on the Taconic yesterday. She told me it was a lovely ride."

Now I shook my head, hard. "That can't be right. It was raining hard and the wind was blowing like a bastard."

"It's almost like the anti-collision saved you by pulling you into another dimension," Kate said, then laughed. "I'm only kidding!"

"You watch too much science fiction," Mike said, with a big smile.

Kate's phone made a noise. She looked at it, and nodded. "I'm late for a meeting," she said.

"Go," Mike said. "We'll straighten this out."

***

Nothing was straightened out, I thought as I drove back to Manhattan. Mike was a nice enough guy, he wanted to be helpful, but the only good thing that had emerged from our meeting was that Mike didn't charge me anything for it. Which I appreciated, but it didn't really leave me any better off than I was before I decided to drive up to Westchester.

What kind of damned collision-avoidance system did this new Prius have? Well, I guess it was more blessed than damned if it saved my life, but even so.

I thought about what Kate had said about the anti-collision saving me by whisking me into an alternate reality. Then I thought about she looked like in those tight blue jeans, as she walked away. That was a lot more pleasing. But then I thought again about that alternate reality.

I was familiar enough with the concept. As I sociologist, I couldn't help but be a fan of science fiction, but, come to think of it, I was a fan since long before I had become a professor. The idea of alternate realities was fascinating to think about – an infinite number of alternate realities or universes, each slightly or more different from the others, none having any idea of the others' existence. Because maybe they weren't at all connected.

Yeah, it was fun to think about, fun to read and watch movies about, but it sure wasn't fun to actually be living it – or maybe living them was the more apt phrase for my situation. Kate had joked about it. But that didn't mean it wasn't actually happening and that I wasn't actually now a part of it. Come to think of it, I couldn't recall ever actually thinking about blue jeans, other than seeing them in a couple of vintage movies from the 1950s. Had they never gone out of fashion in this alternate reality that maybe I now inhabited?

But what did that mean? Toyota had developed an anti-collision system that yanked the driver – and presumably any passengers – into an alternate dimension when the other stop and swerve options weren't available? If so, that would have been the best-kept secret in the world – at least, in the world that I'd come from.

Though unless Mike and Kate had been putting on a grand act, they didn't know about it, either. There must be people higher up in Toyota, for that matter, in other car companies, tech outfits, universities, think tanks, who knew more about the current state of anti-collision systems in automobiles than Mike and Kate. Would they think I was crazy, too?

I drove over the Henry Hudson Bridge to Manhattan. The Easy Pass scanner read my car just fine, as it always did. I needed to think about all the things that were different in this new world, starting with the lack of tree on the highway. That could provide some clue as to where I was, and what had happened to me.

Well, Raeanne was different in bed. I smiled. I could live with that. She'd answered the phone on one ring when I’d called her right after the near-miss yesterday, but that was too trivial a difference to be evidence of anything. Kate said her sister had said the weather in upstate New York was beautiful not stormy, but who knew how reliable her sister or even Kate herself was with weather reports. The different mileage on the car, though, that was big, and it told me something that could be crucial. If the anti-collision had saved me on the highway by yanking me into another dimension, it apparently had yanked just me, not the car. And it had then placed me in another Prius which had higher mileage than mine had had on that highway where the locust tree looked 100% certain to hit me.

The traffic now suddenly bunched up in front of me, as it often did in the stretch of parkway between the Henry Hudson and the George Washington Bridge. I was used to this, and switched lanes almost effortlessly. I even had time to signal my lane change, so as not to invoke that annoying lane-drifting alert.

The only way I could test what was going on with me and my car, I realized, was to get into another life-and-death situation, with death avoidable only by my anti-collision system doing whatever it had done yesterday. But that was a pretty dangerous way to conduct research. Indeed, if I had been channeled into another reality with another car, how did I know that this car I was now driving was even fitted with the same kind of anti-collision system? Maybe the guy, presumably the alternate me, who bought this car was a cheapskate, and opted for a package without that kind of inter-dimensional anti-collision. Or maybe they didn't have that here in this reality at all. The road I was on with this kind of thinking was paved with paradox and vastly more dangerous than the road I actually was on, but even that was by no means clear.

And if I was in an alternate reality now, what had happened to the alternate me? Hey, had I been that insightful yesterday before I went around that bend that had really thrown me some insane curve? Impossible to tell, and that was the nub of the problem. How could I tell if I was the same person I was yesterday? If I was a different person I would have no way of knowing if what I remembered was of this me or that me.

I turned on the radio to clear my mind. A little Beatles music on Sirius XM Radio always helped put things into perspective for me. "Band on the Run" was playing. “Peter Asher here on my show From Me to You on The Beatles Channel, playing their songs that begin with the letter B today,” he said when the music concluded. “That was 'Band On the Run' by The Beatles from their 1975 album Come and Go.”

What?! I pulled my car into a vacant spot too close to a pump about two blocks from my apartment, just so I could stop and make sense of this. I'd done my doctoral dissertation on The Beatles' breakup as the prime example of the inherent instability of musical groups. My advisor, a stickler for traditional sociology – which I always found boring – had offered some resistance to this topic. But I'd prevailed. And I knew The Beatles like the back of my hand. McCartney had released "Band on the Run" – the title track of his album – as Paul McCartney and Wings in 1973. No way Peter Asher, who had practically lived with Paul McCartney when he and Asher's sister Jane had been a couple, could have made a mistake like that. Peter Asher had even gone on to work at Apple Records right around the time The Beatles were disbanding. He knew better than anyone other then McCartney himself the difference between McCartney's output as a Beatle and what he did after that.

At least, in my reality. Or what had been my reality.

***

I sat in my car, stunned, for I don't know how long. Peter Asher played some more songs, but I barely heard, other than something vaguely registering in a part of my brain that nothing I was hearing was at variance with the reality I remembered, the reality I had grown up with, the reality that was me.

For some reason, that attribution of "Band on the Run" to The Beatles rather than Paul McCartney and Wings proved that what Kate had joked about at the Toyota dealer was no joke at all. "Band On the Run" by The Beatles seared the truth of Kate's joke into my soul, more than anything else that had happened to me since that tree had winked out of existence just before it could take me out of existence in that storm on the Taconic Parkway just yesterday.

I was either flat-out hallucinating, yesterday and today, or I had indeed been swapped into an alternate reality when I'd gone around that curve. Swapped seemed the right word, because as far as I could tell, there was no evidence of another me in this reality since I'd arrived. It had just been Raeanne and me in bed last night, no ménage à trois with Raeanne and me and my twin.

So what had happened to the me originally in this reality? What did I know and not know about him? What he had been doing, where had he traveled, in those thousand miles missing in my original car’s itinerary? And at that impossible instant on the Taconic yesterday, was he swapped into my car a nanosecond before the locust went through the windshield and killed on the spot? What kind of psycho-perverse anti-collision app would do that?

I didn't like thinking about that. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the app – it after all had saved my life. I did like thinking about Raeanne – maybe I could be happy in this reality – maybe it had some advantages over my old one. I was glad the Beatles had stayed together at least until the mid 1970s – who knows, maybe in this reality John Lennon had not been killed by that fucker at the Dakota. I focused on what was playing on the radio. It was "Beautiful Boy," the song John had written for his little boy, Sean. It always brought tears to my eyes, as it was doing right now.

"And that's the last of 'B' songs for this episode of From Me to You," Peter Asher said. "I'll be back next week with the 'C's. That was 'Beautiful Boy' by John Lennon, from his Double Fantasy album, released just three weeks before he murdered…"

Well, I guess this wasn't a reality that was better in every way, after all. I sighed and started the car. I might as well drive to the supermarket, surprise Raeanne with a nice shopping, and put this alternate reality on the back-burner -- at least for a few hours, as I did some cooking—

The car made a strange sound and the engine died. What the hell? This was a new car. I cursed a lot more than I would have had this been the only unexpected event in the car the past two days, and I called the AAA.

***

The AAA guy arrived faster than usual. "It's the battery," he told me. "Not the regular battery that's not too expensive and easy to replace. It's the battery that runs the car, makes this Prius a hybrid. You know it's a hybrid right? Runs on fuel only when it's needed, and the rest of the time the battery feeds the engine—"

"Yeah, I know," I said and shook my head. "I don't believe it. This car's just a few months old."

"That's actually good news," the AAA guy said. "Your warranty will definitely cover it, right?"

"Yeah."

"Why don't you hop in the seat," he pointed to his tow-truck. "Where's your dealer? If it's within a hundred miles of here, I can take you, no charge."

***

My Toyota dealer was far less than a hundred miles from Manhattan. I thanked the AAA guy and gave him a big tip when we arrived.

Jorge walked quickly over. "Back so soon?" His smile seemed bigger than ever.

I told him about the central battery.

"Could be serious" Jorge said. "Why don't you go in and see Mr. Mike."

"Right, thanks," I said, and walked to Mike's cubicle. I got lucky again – usually this place was crowded, and at least one or two customers were waiting to see Mike when I arrived. This time, like earlier today, he invited me right in. Well, I guess I'd also been lucky – very lucky – not to have been killed by that locust yesterday, too.

"What happened? Mike asked.

I told him about the battery.

Mike got up and gestured to me to keep sitting. "Let me talk to Jorge," he said.

***

He returned about twenty minutes later. "Sorry for the wait. But good news," Mike said. "The battery's indeed caput, but—"

"How is that good news?"

"You're all covered under the warranty," Mike said.

"You're putting in a new battery now?" I asked.

Mike shook his head no. "This is no ordinary battery—"

"I know."

"We're not going to put in a new battery," Mike said. "Our engineers want to study your car and see if they can figure out what killed the battery."

"I'm still waiting for the good news," I said.

Mike reached over and clapped me on the shoulder. "We're giving you a brand new car. No cost to you. It's all covered under your warranty. I'm going to walk you over to the sales department. They're getting a car ready for you, even as we speak. A slightly different shade from the one you have, but I think you'll like it."

***

I let Mike walk me down a gleaming corridor to the sales department. Kate and her blue jeans were nowhere to be seen. But I didn't care. I had other things on my mind.

I felt that I somehow was being railroaded in this car place. I couldn't see exactly how, but I had the queasy feeling that this new Prius I would be getting would not have all the features of the one whose battery had died. The one whose analog in my original dimension had shunted me into this one, maybe.

I'd found over the years that all models of the same car, even when you checked off the exact-same amenities that you wanted, were never exactly the same. One always had something slightly different from the other – a seat that warmed your ass in winter, a roof that retracted in summer so you could listen to "Back in the USSR" with the wind in your hair, whatever. (Was there still a Soviet Union in this damned reality? I'd have to check.)

And I had a feeling that this new Prius would have a slightly different anti-collision system. One that wouldn't save me from an angry tree hurtling toward me straight out of some tornado horror movie.

What would I have done if the car I had brought here had not been deemed incapable of repair? Drive off a cliff to test its anti-collision system? Put it to the test and see if it was still working the same as yesterday in the analog car?

I went through the motions, signed all the screens, and drove away in my brand new Prius.

***

It occurred to me, as I tried to keep my mind on the road, that maybe Jorge had sabotaged my car this morning when he'd helpfully parked it in the back. Maybe he did something that had made the central battery die. Which meant, what? The Toyota people in this reality knew about their science fictional anti-collision feature – knew it was real – and were trying to keep it secret? At least, some of the people at Toyota, here in this reality?

A car swerved in front of me as I approached the Henry Hudson Bridge. I switched lanes with no problem and without invoking the anti-collision feature, just like I had when I'd driven home earlier today from Toyota in the first car. The truth is, what had happened yesterday on the Taconic had been the first time the anti-collision app had been invoked since I'd bought that first car several months ago. Maybe Toyota knew it was rarely activated, and put in a few experimental features in some models which Toyota figured the public was not very likely to find out about.

Maybe I just had to forget everything that had happened the past two days. Just live my life like any normal person who hadn’t been yanked into an alternate lane of reality. Things weren’t so bad here—

My phone rang. It was Raeanne – the new Raeanne, I assumed. No, things weren’t so bad here at all.

"Hey—" I began, and the phone went dead.

Had she just vanished? I returned the call. Nothing, not even voicemail.

I called her five more times. Same result. Nothing.

Shouldn't I get voicemail if she'd gone into a tunnel, or her phone had died?

Yeah, I should. But not if she and the number I was calling never existed.

I tried again. Nothing. I was sweating—

My phone rang, again. It was Raeanne—

"Are you all right?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she replied. "I just tried to call you, I heard you answer, and then I lost the connection."

"I know," I said. "I tried to call you back. Got nothing – not even voicemail."

"Huh, it's not supposed to do that," she said. "Crazy world we live in."

"Yeah." I guess that was another similarity of this world – her world – and now my world. But there was no point in saying that to Raeanne. Because her world was indeed now my world, and that was ok. I breathed – it felt like for the first time since I'd lost her call. "How about I pick up some food for supper at the supermarket."

"The P&A?" she asked. "Sure – they've really been stepping up their game the past few months. All kinds of specials on tea, finally living up to their Great Pacific and Atlantic Tea Company name."