When I was a teenager, Mrs. Clatworthy, my grade 12 English teacher, a stern, intelligent woman who clanked through her classroom as if she was wearing a suit of armour (she is worthy of much praise, which I’ll get to one of these days), taught us about archetypes. There were twelve, she said. All literature settled into one of these twelve. She showed us how. I was convinced.
That summer, sitting in the backyard and waiting for my shift at the pharmacy to come round, an idea came to me: I would invent a new archetype. I never did, of course, and never will. But I admire the naïve ambition. I was young.
This memory popped into my head while editing a collection of short stories I’ve been putting together. A friend and editor pointed out that one of the stories, “Tom Hanks Never Died,” has the same plot as the 2019 film, Yesterday. In my story, a guy ends up the only person in the universe who knows about the most famous movies of our day. In Yesterday, a guy ends up in a universe where he is the only one who knows the music of The Beatles. Same story; different pieces.
I didn’t watch Yesterday before I wrote my story, and I’ve yet to see it. At the time I was writing my story, I thought I had a new idea. Turns out I didn’t. As I look at it now, I’m pretty sure that everybody has imagined the same scenario. In a way, it’s sort of obvious.
I don’t feel bad about treading the same plot line that others have. I happen to think that the honestly original—the never-seen-before, the paradigm-making, the miraculous—passes by about as often as Halley’s Comet. Most ideas build on what came before. It’s good to build something better. It’s good enough to build something that doesn’t fall when the wind moves.
Here’s that story. It might seem familiar.
Tom Hanks Never Died
The universe split sometime in late 1995. I can’t say exactly when it happened. It could have been earlier, but it couldn’t have been later. What I can say with certainty is that the last movie Tom Hanks put out before he died was Toy Story in 1995. All the stuff he put out after that brilliant film never happened—for any of the people living in this universe. But in the universe where I came from, Tom Hanks never died.
I made the discovery of my displacement by accident. I was sitting in the cafeteria of the university where I worked with my friend Ian. We had gotten together, as we occasionally did, to eat a slice of lamp-warmed pizza and catch up on life. Ian worked in the university’s records office as a clerk. He lacked all professional ambition except the hope that he might make it big as a writer of detective novels. He had written a dozen novels, all unpublished, and spoke constantly about Det. Luke Lanza, as if the detective were a real person, a friend Ian looked up to.
Because he didn’t look up to me. I lacked all ambition, including a desire to write. I had no hobbies. I had no family. The only thing I had going for me was a PhD in particle physics that I had earned thirty years before, back when I had ambition, a hobby (I collected coins), and a family (a wife who divorced me and two adult daughters who hardly ever called). I had bottomed out in the worst way possible. I was the guy who used to have it all.
At this lunch hour, Ian and I were talking about the Wars. The Great War was awful, a real waste of life, but man, the Second World War was a clearing house. But still, you know, there was something romantic about it. Those old films and all that sentimental music evoked nostalgia for what was, for the several tens of millions who died, the worst time of their lives. Wouldn’t it be great to be there—if you didn’t get killed?
Then I said to Ian, “It’s like that scene in Saving Private Ryan when they’re walking across France. You’ve traversing a beautiful landscape, breathing in the mystery of the Old World, all charged up with adrenaline, since you’re there to kill somebody, which is probably the most exciting thing you can ever do. I think I’d want to be there. Do you ever think about killing somebody and what it must be like?”
Ian lowered his pizza slice from his mouth and wiped away a patch of grease with a napkin.
“What movie are you talking about?” he said.
“Saving Private Ryan,” I said. “With Tom Hanks. And that ape Matt Damon.”
“Tom who?” Ian said.
Now I took a moment to wipe the grease from my mouth. I knew Ian considered himself a movie buff. He quoted films like a televangelist quotes Leviticus.
“Tom Hanks,” I said. “Have you got dementia now?”
“I’d remember if I did. But I don’t remember Hanks doing any war movies. When did he do it?”
As he said this, he pulled out his phone and started searching.
“I don’t know. 1999 or something.”
“No, Tom Hanks died in 1995. I liked him. What was the movie called?”
“Saving Private Ryan,” I said, and dropped my pizza and pulled out my phone. “Tom Hanks isn’t dead, he—”
The words jammed in my throat. There, on the search page, was an entry for Tom Hanks.
Dead, 1995.
“What the hell?”
“No such movie, dumbass,” Ian said, and put his phone down so he could pick up his slice.
I felt my body wrinkle as I searched for Saving Private Ryan. Nothing came up. No such movie had ever been made. For a moment, I thought I might throw up. A sweat broke across my forehead and I leaned forward and passed out.
Ian called the campus police, who called an ambulance, who I waved away with a joke about the bad pizza. Ian stuck around and asked me, again, in an uncharacteristically serious way, if I was okay. I said I was and said goodbye, and as soon as the police and ambulance had filtered out of the cafeteria, and the students eating their cafeteria lunches stopped staring at me, I headed to my lab to find out what the hell might have happened.
My lab was still my lab. The key I had on my LAST CALL? NO THANKS! keychain worked and I let myself in. I steeled myself by eating a dozen Oreos that I kept in a drawer, then started researching what might have happened to me. By the end of the day, I had made a list of three scientifically plausible explanations.
Explanation #1: I’m crazy. But if I’m crazy, why do I remember my life so well? I remembered it all in high resolution detail: standing on the front porch in the sun so my mother could take a photo before I left for my first day of kindergarten; stealing five bucks from Ivan Spaemann’s wallet when he was changing for gym class; staring down at my grandmother’s corpse at the McMillen funeral home and wondering who to call if a fly crawled out of her nose holding a piece of her brain in its spindly little hands; getting a nosebleed while making out with Debbie Walsh in the backseat of her dad’s car and spending the rest of the evening vainly scrubbing blood from the beige upholstery; stepping out of the chapel, a married man floating on the sureness that he had made the best decision of his life.
All that stuff was too vivid. Too real. I couldn’t have made it up. If I didn’t live that life, then somebody else must have.
Explanation #2: I somehow fell through a vortex into another dimension where Tom Hanks actually did die in 1995. I had class this morning, and I hadn’t run into another version of myself—the one that occupied this universe—so what happened to him? My best guess, if this premise was true, was that we somehow swapped positions, and now there was a version of me walking around in my universe, stunned to learn that Tom Hanks was still alive.
Explanation #3: Rather than falling bodily through a vortex, only my consciousness crossed into another universe.
How any of this happened, I still have no idea. I was convinced it had happened, somehow, and struck Explanation #1: I’m crazy from my list.
As I arrived at this tentative conclusion, another thought entered my consciousness: Was I still married to Jenny?
In the universe where Tom Hanks had never died, Jenny and I met when we were twenty, married at twenty-one, had two children by the time we were twenty-five, and endured an intense and angry marriage that lasted until we were forty-five. She left me the house and nothing else. Not even an explanation. That I worked out for myself when I saw her running on the lakeshore with a much more handsome man. After we settled the terms of our divorce, she and her new man moved to the Florida Keyes. My daughters, both adults, ended up down around Florida through marriage and work, and for the most part they stayed down there, even at Christmas.
It hurt. And, like the strange new world I had found myself, I couldn’t explain it. My friend Trevor, who I saw occasionally, like I saw Ian occasionally, told me that sometimes in life people drift apart, even in families. “Sometimes you just don’t like other people,” he said. “Including the people in your own family.”
I could understand that. I never cared much for my great-uncle. He hung around the house until his death at ninety-eight. He was a sour man who growled and called me fat and told my mother she didn’t know how to raise her kids.
What I couldn’t understand was how my marriage had ended. It wasn’t supposed to. We promised it wouldn’t end. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Yes, I didn’t do much, but I wasn’t bad. I never cheated. I never hit her. I spent too much time on the couch. It’s true I stopped dressing up when we went out—sweatpants became my uniform—and I liked to joke with people about the difficulties of married life, as if Jenny were a Siamese twin that I would kill to free myself from if killing her didn’t bleed me to death. But I thought we were happy.
It was only after the marriage collapsed, like a dusty old barn falling apart in the middle of the night, that I realized how bloody depressed I was. I tried to climb out of the grave I was slipping into, and I did, for the most part. I mean, I didn’t kill myself. But I never got around to actually doing anything. I didn’t even date. I got fat. I hung around my lab at all hours of the day and night. The feeling that “soon this would be all over, so why bother?” hung heavily around me. I let myself get used to it.
As I drove the loop of my street, hope bumped in my chest. I imagined pulling up to the house and stepping inside and seeing Jenny at the table reading papers from her work and waiting to reheat my dinner and greet me with a kiss. Like she did when we first were married. I wondered if fate followed me across universes and I’d discover that in any universe I visited, Jenny would be gone. Would I open the door and find a note on the kitchen table, along with a letter from her lawyer, like I did when she left me?
But she was there. In this universe, she was in the living room, typing on her phone.
I almost fell down the short flight of stairs that led to the living room. All the things I wanted to tell her and all the speeches I had imagined over the years collected in my chest. She said hello but didn’t look up.
“I missed you,” I said.
At this, she glanced at me, then looked back down at her phone.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m from another universe. I didn’t think you’d be here.”
She smiled. Not at me, at whatever message had appeared on her phone.
“Hm?”
“Nothing,” I replied.
A shock of mental feedback blasted in my skull. Jenny had dumped me five years ago, and she was like this: distant, disinterested. My wife on her damned phone.
I went to the kitchen. From the bag on the counter and the receipt, I knew she had bought herself a salad for dinner. I opened the fridge. It was empty. I picked at some cheese and bread and watched her through the kitchen door. She was fatter in this universe. She hadn’t left me for that stud. Maybe she was still going to.
I wept for a while. When I had finished, I went upstairs and showered and shaved and put on a decent pair of pants. I went downstairs to the living room. Jenny was still on the couch with her phone while the television blasted a rerun of Wheel of Fortune.
“Do you want to go out for dinner?” I asked.
It was as if I had asked her if she wanted to raise scorpions with me on a farm in Arizona.
“Where?” she said.
That was better than Why?
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “Whatever you’re craving.”
From my office the next day, I called my daughters. I asked them how they were. I got stories out of them both. Karen, my older daughter, was dealing with a difficult employee. The guy was slacking. I gave her advice. I learned that she had two kids in this universe. She was happily married, too. Lucy, my other daughter, spouted, as she usually does, a mass of information that I collected on a notepad. Lucy, who is the easier of the two to talk to, has always had a sense of humour. I said to her, “If I told you I was from another universe and I just got here without any memory of how this universe unfolded, what would you tell me to do to make your mother happy?”
Lucy was quiet for a minute. “There is probably nothing you can do. I suppose you could take her somewhere. I mean, move to another place. I think she hates where she ended up.”
“With me, you mean?”
“With everything. If you can take her to a new universe, you should.”
My daughter is smart. And that gave me an idea. I sat down at my desk in my laboratory and wrote until my cramped hands would not let me write anymore.
The first four agents sent back boilerplate rejection letters. The fifth, Rose Saba, called my original screenplay for the full-length feature film Saving Private Ryan “brilliant and unprecedented.”
“I really think that this could be the definitive war film,” she said to me over the phone from Hollywood.
“I agree,” I replied. “Ideally Tom Hanks would be alive to play the lead, but—”
“Yes!” she said. “He would have been perfect. Look, I’ve got a meeting with a producer on Monday, so I’ll drop his name as a could-have-been when I mention this project. In the meantime, try and come up with some other leads.”
“I will. Oh, before you go, Rose. Did you have a chance to look at the other script I sent you? It’s called Star Wars.”
“I think we have something really good here with Saving Private Ryan,” she said, “and I think we can get this picked up in a big way. But I don’t there is much of an appetite for a nine-part space opera. Let’s see how this lands first.”
“Okay, I get it. One thing at a time. But trust me, Star Wars is the perfect franchise film. And don’t worry, I’m going to fix the ending.”
“Let me sell this screenplay and then we’ll talk.”
Life changed when I won an Oscar for best original screenplay. Jenny and I sold our house in Rolling Meadows and relocated to L.A. We lived on a big, tree-shaded street inhabited by Hollywood’s elite.
I kept busy writing scripts for films I could only faintly remember. I wrote a few bestselling novels, including one that was wholly original, and a dozen number one hit singles, since in this universe Michael Jackson had never existed. Naturally, I published a few paradigm-shifting papers in particle physics in my spare time.
Jenny set up a foundation to care for sick cats and dogs. It was a tax shelter for us, a wise business move, and a ticket into the top parties. She reached her zenith when she was invited to speak at a United Nations Special Commission on Animal Rights. We framed a photo of her speaking at the UN and hung it in the living room. The nameplate from her fifteen-minute testimony sat on her desk.
Late one evening, years later, as the caterers cleaned up after a dinner party that we had hosted for a hundred of our closest friends, Jenny, watery from the wine, snuggled up beside me, and asked me what had happened to me.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When did you get so interesting?” she said.
“I don’t think I’ve changed.”
“You were never an artist. You were always so stiff. So boring. And now….”
She gestured vaguely at our opulence, took another, final sip of her wine, and leaned back in her chair to survey the stars we couldn’t see through the clouds.
“All those years of waiting for something to finally happen,” she said. “It was like waiting for the bus to come. Why did it take so long?”
She drifted to sleep. I kissed her hand and went to let the caterers off the estate. When they were gone, I dropped myself in one of the Porsches and went for a drive. I parked at the Overlook and got out of my car.
The LA skyline burned beneath me. It was late, and I needed to get back home. I had a meeting the next day with a gang of producers to go over what would be my first film as a director, a never-before-imagined epic about a boy wizard. The film would take upwards a year to shoot, a year broken up with cross-Atlantic flights as I leapt from one meeting to another, battled producers, consulted with my lawyers about the lawsuits I was facing, and, if there was time, maybe fit a physics conference into my schedule. Because, for the first time in a long time, I had an idea of my own.
In the air beside me, a vortex like a rose window spun into existence. Through the hole I could see what I knew was the universe that I belonged to. My desk in the laboratory looked as I had left it, with cookie crumbs on the sliding stacks of papers and post-it notes framing the computer monitor. My desk at home would have looked the same, except that I had moved it from the home office into the living room after Jenny had left me.
I looked through that spinning hole. It slowly shrank, closing.
I stepped through.
Robert Grant Price is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories, My Girlfriend, the Hologram.