The first time your powers inexplicably stop working, it seems pretty normal... for whatever value of "normal" was applicable on a day like this. But you had saved Chloe's life, so if rewinding time was a one-off deal, and even if you can never possibly prove it to anyone, you are happy with it. The next day Chloe shows you around the junkyard, and you catch up. You make peace. You promise to help find Rachel Amber in any way you can.
A runaway train flattens you both. Chloe dies instantly in a tsunami of blood; your leg is torn off in your rescue attempt, lacerating your femoral artery. You bleed out before help arrives.
As you hear Chloe's distant screams for help like a scratched record repeating itself, you are dimly aware of how you must look to her - blinking from her side to the top of the hill to the track switch in an instant... or else never having been at her side to begin with.
"Turn it back!" Chloe shrieks, clutching the blood-soaked hole in her gut, the gun she was playing with already forgotten on the ground. "Undo it undo it undo it!"
"I'm trying!" you cry, hand raised helplessly as you try, try to find that loose thread, that piece of the past to grab hold of and pull until it all unwinds... but it's gone.
"Max, oh my god..." Chloe's face is pale and twisted with increasing pain, so you stop trying to use your magic fucking powers and do something real. "Max, it hurts, please... ahh!"
"Stop moving around," you snap as you lay her to the ground and press your balled-up hoodie to her side. "You're digging the bullet in deeper!"
"Yeah, I can fucking feel it Max!" she yells right back, and for a second you smile. She's okay. Even if you can't keep this from happening anymore, she's going to be okay.
Except she dies along with the rest of the hospital patients in a freak hurricane four days later.
Most of the research you'd been gathering points to the idea of time being not so much a straight line of past to future, but an infinite maze of decisions. The idea of that many universes, each created by every single choice from every individual there is, boggles the mind. Infinity was just a word before. Now you're starting to wrap your head around its full scope. And it's terrifying, because every single one of them is real to you now.
You leave an entire trail of Maxes along the path to the Prescott Dormitory, woven through the crowd of students and faculty that stare in horror, fascination, or both at the girl balanced on the edge of the roof. Some of the Maxes fall out of the time-freeze almost immediately, and scream in helpless rage when Kate falls. Others hold on longer, only to collapse, hemorrhaging, just inside the door.
One of you even trips David Madsen on his way up the stairs with your prone body. In that universe, the blame for Kate's death is all yours.
Life is unfair, but death is unbearable, even at a distance. Pain scares you like nothing else. When given the ability to undo painful consequences, you pick and choose your way through branching realities along the path of least resistance. What you fail to account for is that you are not the sole pilot of this universe. Out of billions of possible decisions made each second, you control at most a handful of outcomes.
Your world is not infinite and never was, and some outcomes cannot be avoided no matter how hard you try.
One of you is Maxine—and you wake up over Chloe Price's sickbed, a used hypodermic clutched in your hand, with no memory of how you got there. You stare at it, uncomprehending, and are only shaken awake by the loud beeps and alarms of the machinery around you. William bursts in, cordless phone in one hand already dialed - calling her nurse, you think as your brain dutifully fills you in on what you appear to have missed.
"What happened?" he all but shouts, peering into his daughter's unmoving dilated eyes. Then he turns to face you, and his gaze slides to what you hold in your hand. He trembles, looks like he's about to say something, then stops.
Someone is speaking on the other end of the phone. Without a word, William hangs up on them, and redials 911.
Assisted suicide is a crime in Oregon. You are convicted of manslaughter.
A photograph is a moment, a single instant, made still and silent. If you can hear it, if you can tune your attention so far inward that the world slips inside out, upside down, and what was past is folded into the present. Something to do with wormholes—Warren would know more. But even you know that the streams cannot cross. Two branches of the same decision cannot fold into one reality.
One of you is Maxine—and you wake up over Chloe Price's sickbed, a sealed hypodermic clutched in your hand, with no memory of how you got there. Chloe won't look at you, has turned her head as far away as she is able, not making a sound. Your brain remembers what happened, if not quite why. Certainly not why your cheeks are wet. It's a sad situation, to be certain, but life is like that sometimes. You're not even entirely certain why you decided to visit, since you don't consider yourself all that close to Chloe anymore.
("I would never do that to Cloe," you remember saying. A lie, both for you and for the Max who said it.)
So you leave. William is too busy pouring over bills to notice your departure; you wouldn't know what to say to him anyway.
He does call you five weeks later to inform you of his daughter's death, though. She had finally, inevitably, suffocated.
Your death is a universal constant, you think, unbidden, as Jefferson's bullet strikes Chloe between the eyes. And you knew, somehow. You always knew. Whatever it is you're doing, however it is you're doing it, you know in your bones that it isn't natural. Hopping between universes - whether by saving a bird or saving a man - isn't meant to happen. Reality corrects course where it can, but can't survive the strain forever, and something is going to give.
Great power does not mitigate your mistakes. It amplifies them.
Time breaks down.
You can feel it in the constant crawling on your skin, brushing against the tattered edges of realities that now never were. You can feel it in the ache in your marrow, vibrating and insubstantial as the stellar matter that makes up your body is pulled apart and reconstituted a thousand times per nanosecond. There is no Max Caufield; you are all of the Max Caufields pressed and overlapped together. Pieces of you bubble to the surface, demanding acknowledgement, demanding to be made real. Layers upon layers of yourself shuffle in and out as the universe unwinds in great glowing coils, solidifying with new choices or fading out entirely as more and more timelines collapse. Memories of a thousand trillion realities crowd your perception and somehow you contain them all.
And then you are one again. The maddening buzz of infinite worlds retreats to a safe distance, or perhaps you push yourself to the forefront. And all you know, one blessedly singular idea in your head, is that this is all wrong, and if you stay on this course there's only one way to fix it.
Every person in Arcadia Bay is here, and you are going to kill them all.
"Who... Who are you?" you ask.
"Holy shit, am I cereal?" you snap back. "I'm me, dumbass. Or I'm one of many Maxes I left behind."
"Can you get me out of here?" You look terrified and exhausted. This infuriates you.
"Oh, so I want help?" You scoff at yourself. "Thought I could control everybody and everything, huh? Twist time around my fingers?"
You set your jaw. "I tried to help. I only wanted to do the right thing."
"No, I only wanted to be popular. And once I got these amaaaazing powers, my big plan was to trick people into thinking I give a rat's ass." More of you claw for the surface but you beat them back. You deserve everything that's coming at you, and you are determined to tell yourself exactly why before it all goes to shit again.
"I do care!" you protest. "That's why I was trying to make friends!"
"By telling people what they want to hear?" You snarl the truth you've always known, hating yourself all the while. "I were just looking for a shortcut, because I can't make friends on my own!"
"That's not true." You're shaking now, and don't sound certain at all. "I have great friends... and I've used my powers for good..."
You roll your own eyes at your own patheticness. "Please, stop playing innocent. I'm a goddamn hypocrite. I've left a trail of death and suffering behind me!"
"That was not my fault!" you say, clenching your fists.
"I fucked up time and space to save my precious punk Chloe." The clammoring in your head grows louder. Something is reconstituting on the edge of infinity; you can pick out individual voices again now, and the memory of pain, the combined pain of every Max there ever was, impells you to ask, "Do I think she's worth all that?"
It is, to your dismay, a sincere question, because you truly do not know.
Only you do know. "Of course," you say, halfway to a sob at the contradictory truth of it all. "She's my best friend."
The fact that that's true just makes you angrier. "I ignored my 'best friend' for five years while she went through hell!" you shout. "Some friend I am!"
"Chloe does a better job of guilt-tripping me than you do!" you yell right back.
"Because I let her bully me! It's called Stockholm Syndrome, but I never did that homework, so I'll have to learn the hard way... like Rachel." And that is the one singular constant in your shredded mind—Rachel is dead. Rachel was always dead. You were never able to save her, but Chloe...
"Just shut up!" you cry. "You're not scaring me anymore!"
Another fucking lie. "I'd be more worried about Chloe killing me than Jefferson." You almost laugh, but it comes up painful, like glass clawing at your lungs. "Max, do I really think she's my friend? That she respects me in any way?" It hurts it hurts it hurts... "Man... I am so stupid..."
Something in your multitude snaps like a rubber band giving out and reclaiming its proper shape. Chloe swaggers in, and you are dizzy at the sight of her. A sad pile of broken dreams and broken promises sits across from you, and she stares daggers as she flings all of your self-loathing right back in your face.
"Dude, do not even fuck with her head!"
Your head's been fucked from the start, whether it's the swirling maelstrom of fragmented universes cutting your gray matter to ribbons, or whatever cowardly, broken piece of your shitty personality that ever could have thought your fucking guilt complex was more important than your best friend.
"She knows what we went through together this week, and you don't!"
But you do know. Every iteration, every permutation of the last five days has been yours to agonize over for aeons. Gunshots scream in your mind over and over, drugs fizzle through your system, alcohol burns you from the inside out. Chloe dies a hundred thousand deaths and you weep hysterical tears over each and every one until the sheer multitude of them wears your heart away.
You are Max Caufield. You are all Max Caufields.
She is Chloe Price. She is the only Chloe Price.
"There's no way you can break up our team!"
And it's not fair! cries one of you. Why can Kate be saved, but not Chloe?
Why should Chloe be saved, but not Kate, snarls another as you demolish the shrine by her door in mournful fury.
You are all Max Caufields. She is the only Chloe left alive. A hundred thousand scenarios and she's the only one, saved at the cost of literally everything.
You break, you scream—
"This is reality!"
And then a curious stillness follows her words. Everything collapses down to a single focal point, the lens through which, not every choice, but the choices that are yours, are made. Two branches of the same decision cannot fold into one reality, but memories are forever, bleeding their influence across the page until one picture can't be differentiated from another. All moments are one moment. This is the eye of the storm.
The focal lens draws away as the knotted spool of time untangles. The sawblade's edge of clashing worlds fades fades from your awareness as darkness rolls in all around you. What's left is just moments, snapshots in time that got crowded out by contradictory recollections even though they were always there.
The universe is mind-bogglingly infinite, but reality is singular. Reality is a moment, to be experienced and remembered, and allowed to inform the next moment. And the decisions you make to create that reality? The reasons you make them, good or bad? They belong to no one but you.
It is finally, blessedly quiet. The path ahead is clear. There is only one choice left.
You smile gently at the camera in your hands.
And you remember.
You are Max Caufield. The real Max Caufield.
You don't think of yourself as real. You don't think of yourself as much of anything. A shitty artist and shittier friend. A month you've been back in Arcadia Bay. A full month you could have been with Chloe, reunited, making up for the five years you so fecklessly threw away without sending her so much as a text. You knew she was in pain when you left, and you did nothing.
You knew she was waiting when you returned, and you did nothing. Just kept putting it off and putting it off, because you're a fucking coward - so scared she'd reject you, and knowing you'd deserve it if she did. You threw this month away just the same as those five years. You had so many chances but discarded them all.
And now it's too late. Chloe's dead. She's dead and you watched her die, not even knowing it was her. You watched her terrified last moments in silence, too much of a coward to act until the shot rang out, echoing deafeningly off the tiled walls.
You haven't stopped hearing that echo in the days since.
You stare at the casket, utterly numb. A few feet to your right, Joyce weeps on the shoulder of her new husband - you haven't even registered his face or his name. To your left are your friends Warren and Kate, there mostly for your sake, but you can't look at them either. Maybe some Chloe-inspired part of you wants to hate them, to blame them for making you miss time with Chloe, but you know that's a lie... mostly.
I'd trade them, you think as you stare blindly ahead. I would. A flutter of blue appears, and for a moment your eyes bulge, heart pounding, seeking that winsome smirk and dazzling slanted eyes... But it's only a butterfly. Its wings are the exact same shade of blue as Chloe's dyed hair, the last real color you saw before the world collapsed around you and you realized the enormity of your selfishness, your apathy. It's the color that finally breaks you.
Chloe... You wimper as your vision blurrs and your breath hitches in your chest. Chloe please come back. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry... I'd give anything to have you back, please...
Anything?
You almost don't hear it. The roaring of the gunshot in your ears still hasn't stopped, and you can barely breathe. The butterfly has not moved.
Would you truly give anything for your friend to be alive? Think carefully, now!
You do think carefully. You think of how abandoned Chloe must have felt these past five years. You think of all the pain and resentment sheer desperation that must have driven her to try and extort a murderer. You think of the past month at Blackwell Academy and all the faces you've barely put any effort into knowing, but sort of wish you did. Kate's gentleness, Warren's movie tickets, Joyce's endless hard work that all amounted to nothing with Chloe gone. You think of every restless night in Seattle when you stared at your phone and wished you had the courage to make that call. And you think of every night, in far vaster numbers, that you didn't.
The butterfly still hasn't moved. Nothing, you realize, has moved for quite some time.
"I don't know," you whisper into the waiting silence. "I just wish I had done something differently. If I could just have a little more time with her, just so I could tell her—" Your throat closes up. You squeeze your eyes shut.
Life is not always meant for second chances, says the butterfly. It is unpredictable, chaotic, and strange. To live in a timeline not your own, to witness the choices you never made, could exact a terrible price. What universe you call your own is for you to decide, as it is for all of us to decide. Now choose.
- STAY - - GO BACK -
All the universe has pulled to a halt... or maybe you no longer quite exist there, as whatever binds you to what you've done and not done comes apart. You can see it now, the spiral of all that is but not all that could be, and it could be made to unwind itself if only, if only—
The world blurs, a doubled image overlapping itself and restructuring and pulling apart again like something about to split in two. You could be here, in this graveyard under the sun, surrounded by people who love you... Or, if things happened differently, you could be atop the mountain, under a downpour, struggling up the muddy path in the arms of the most important person in the world.
You are the chaos, the oncoming storm, and it's just one more reason for you to hate yourself.
(Chloe tells you otherwise. You are powerful. You are a force for good in this wretched world. More than anything else, you are loved.)
In another time and place, someone dozing in the middle of class wakes with a start, with fragmented memories of wind and rain, filled with an abrupt and utterly alien sense of purpose and desperate certainty.
That person, you realize, is you.