“No… I don’t know how it works, all that computer stuff.”

“So then tell me what documents you need, and I’ll be happy to do it for you.”

“There’s some form for appealing a decision by the Kupat Cholim. And instructions about what other documents to submit along with it.”

She minimizes the architectural rendering, goes to the website of the Kupat Cholim, searches for the keywords, finds the form.

“I found it. Do you want me to fill it out for you?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind. Thank you so much, Nechami. Could I pay you for your time?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scoffs. “Really, Gedalya! Did your wife charge me for all the cakes she baked for our bar mitzvah?”

“It’s not the same. If I pay you, then it counts as work time,” he says. She doesn’t reply to that, and he moves on to the next point. She reads the first entry on the form, he gives her the information, she fills in the blanks.

“Moses, our askan, was taking care of all the paperwork for us until now,” he bursts out suddenly. “But it turns out that the picture he painted is a little too rosy. He’s a good man, a baal chesed, and he’s got connections, but he promised more than he could deliver. Apparently, the cases he was familiar with, when the Kupah funded similar procedures abroad, were a pretty long time ago. Now they’re not funding them anymore. And we already paid the advance.”

Nechami diligently types in the technical details.

“I consulted another askan, someone high up in Siyuah LaMarpeh. He thought the same as Rav Dassman, that the procedure should be done in the US, not here. That’s why I’m submitting this form — he explained to me what I should say.”

“Hashem ya’azor, it should all work out,” Nechami says.

The phone is so hot, it’s burning her ear. She shifts it to the other ear. One of these days she’ll get rid of this junky phone and get a decent one. Besides everything else that’s wrong with it, the charger cable is too short. When it’s plugged in, she has to sit hunched over to talk on the phone, with her ear bent toward the wall socket.

“Hashem ya’azor,” Gedalya affirms. “But it doesn’t look like the Kupah will agree to fund a surgery in America. From what I understand, the state has an interest in giving local hospitals experience in procedures like these. They even brought in a professor from California to train local doctors in the kind of biological implant that Tovi’s supposed to get.”

“And…?”

Gedalya sighs. “The professor came, and he taught them, and still, as far as we’re concerned, they don’t have enough experience and know-how here in Israel, not for Tovi’s specific case. Aside from the implant, which they do with much better results in chutz l’Aretz, the doctor we’ve been in contact with, Dr. Barclay, also knows how to open up the auditory canal, all in the same operation.”

“What does that mean?” Nechami asks. She feels Gedalya has given her an opening, opened up a little canal, if you will. In her mind’s eye, she sees sweet Tovi. Is he saying that in Israel, they only implant an external ear, without ensuring a functional hearing canal?

But he’s already backtracking. He’s revealed too much and regrets it. “Never mind, that’s not really relevant. Let’s just get on with the form.” Nechami  obediently goes back to the form.

When she finally ends the call, she looks at the gray, treeless sidewalk in front of Mosdos Beis Eliav. The fence, on the other hand, sports a Turkish rug pattern of deep red and cream arabesques. Quite stunning. Who did that? Who was playing idly with the Gunter file while talking on the phone all that time?

• ••

Everything was normal until midday. Relatively speaking.

Nechami had spent half an hour helping Gedalya and still managed to put in four full hours of work. She’d sent the rendering to Gunter, received one compliment and three corrections, corrected the rendering as requested, and even worked on two pages of Dudi’s physics booklet.

At one fifteen she stands up and stretches. She takes a glance around the room, delighting in the silver birds against the lavender-hued walls, and then goes upstairs to make some chicken nuggets and rice.

She senses something alien the moment she steps inside.

“Is someone here?” she calls out, unnerved. There’s no answer.

She walks into the kitchen and finds herself already there. Or someone who looks rather like her. Her heart plunges.

“Excuse me?” she says.

“Who are you?” the other woman asks.

Nechami’s eyes flit around the kitchen. No, she hasn’t walked into a neighbor’s apartment by mistake. This is her kitchen, with the wood-look formica cabinets, with the shining circle from Shua’s cup of coffee on the milchig counter, and the….

“This is my house,” she says doggedly, although every bone in her body wants to scream and run away.

The other woman shakes her head complacently and says, “It’s my house,” as she seasons the rice and pours boiling water over it.

“I’m asking you to leave. Please,” says Nechami, her voice shaking, sounding strange.

“A person sometimes finds himself in a parallel universe,” the impostor informs her. “Alternate stories take place simultaneously. Sometimes a person finds himself in a story that’s not his own. A person is the product of his choices. It all depends on quantum superposition.”

Nechami grasps her skirt with both hands. It feels real. As she looks downward, her glance takes in the other woman’s slippers. They are identical to her own, metallic blue Birkenstocks. It terrifies her. The black hoodie she’s wearing looks very familiar, too. It’s the one she wears around the house, with the sequined purple butterfly.

“It’s a real thing, slipping through a wormhole into a parallel universe,” the woman tells her, peeking into the rice pot. Nechami looks at the oven. Her chicken nuggets are there, quietly baking.

“It happens when the symmetry between the dimensions is broken.”

Nechami is frozen in place. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a flowerpot on the shelf. It’s filled with delicate pink flowers. There was no pot of flowers on her kitchen shelf this morning, that’s for sure.

“In this universe, I’m you and you’re me. It looks like you’ve accidentally slipped in from the parallel universe.”

Nechami is silent, and that encourages the stranger to keep chattering. “Superposition is recognized by science today,” she calmly teaches, as if explaining how to make a piecrust. And what is that yellow stuff she’s adding to the rice, for Heaven’s sake? But who knows, maybe in this other universe, Shua likes turmeric?

“Fifty years ago, a traveler was arrested at the airport in Tokyo. He had a passport from a country called Taured, which couldn’t be found on any map. He had a coherent explanation for what he’d been doing in Tokyo, the companies he’d been dealing with, where he’d been staying and so on, and he had documents to back up his story. But when they checked it out, nobody from the hotel or the companies had ever heard of him.” She laughs, a strange, alien laugh. “So the police arrested him. The next morning, they found he’d disappeared. He’d gone back to his own universe.”

Suddenly Nechami screams, “Imma’le!!” and flees — from this foreign house, from this terrible mistake, from this madness.

“Aaahhh…” But she can’t get the whole scream out, her voice is lost in the empty living room before she reaches the door.

She stands in the front yard, trembling, afraid to go back down to her office. Is it her office, or will she find another version of herself there? Will there even be an office there? Maybe in this parallel universe she and Shua never built an office?

She hears quiet singing. Shua and Yehudit are coming home from her gan, singing “Yevanim Nikbetzu Alai” as they play a game, skipping over three stones at a time with perfect precision.

Then they see her there, crying and shaking. They stop abruptly.

“Yehudit,” Shua says, “go over to Naaman in the next building, okay? Ask them if you can stay with them for a few minutes.”

Yehudit is happy to comply. The Naamans have a trampoline, a swing, and a ball pit. She disappears into the neighboring building.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I don’t know if I’m your real wife,” she sobs. “I’m not sure I belong here.”

Deep creases appear between his eyes. “Nechami, is everything all right?”

“No.” She’s crying harder now, and her hands shake wildly. Back in her first seminary year, Shiffy Neiholtz tried to teach her to play violin. She could never get the vibrato right. She couldn’t relax her wrist enough to let her hand tremble properly. Shiffy ought to see her now — with not one, but both hands doing a virtuoso performance. “I went home to make lunch, and someone else was there instead of me, wearing my clothes and cooking the rice and chicken nuggets…”

“Wait here a minute,” Shua says. “Let me go check.”

“No!” She stops him. This feels so ridiculous. But maybe she’s really slipped into the wrong universe. Maybe Shua will go inside and see his real wife there, and she’ll be left here on the street. “There really are theories about parallel universes, Shua. Dudi told me. Physicists with top credentials agree that it’s possible, and there could be wormholes connecting very distant points….”

“Nechami,” he interrupts her, repressing a smile, “I don’t know what might go on in other universes, but in this universe you’re my wife. Even when you get hysterical, I know you’re the woman I married. That other woman you saw must be the one from the parallel universe.”

He heads inside, step by purposeful step, to their apartment. From the side yard of the next building, Nechami hears Yehudit whooping with joy, jumping on the trampoline with Faigy Naaman. She breathes, trying to dispel the terror that envelopes her, and one clear thought pulses in her brain: If you really have dropped in accidentally from another universe, what would you like to find there when you return home?

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 859)