—However, he continued, having observed that there is enough variety in human experience to sustain our sense of individuality in a locus as vast as New York, I strongly suspect that there is only just enough variety to do so. For were it in our power to gather up all the personal stories that have been experienced in different cities and townships around the world and across time, I haven’t the slightest doubt that doppelg?ngers would abound. Men whose lives—despite the variation here and there—were just as our own in every material respect. Men who have loved when we loved, wept when we wept, accomplished what we have accomplished and failed as we have failed, men who have argued and reasoned and laughed exactly as we.
The professor looked around again.
—Impossible, you say?
Though no one had said a word.
—It is one of the most basic principles of infinity that it must, by definition, encompass not only one of everything, but everything’s duplicate, as well as its triplicate. In fact, to imagine that there are additional versions of ourselves scattered across human history is substantially less outlandish than to imagine that there are none.
The professor turned his gaze back to Ulysses.
—So, do I think it is possible that your life could be an echo of the life of the Great Ulysses, and that after ten years you could be reunited with your wife and son? I am certain of it.
Ulysses had taken in what the professor had said with the greatest gravity. Now he stood, and the professor stood, and the two clasped hands, each seeming to have found an unexpected solace from the other. But when the two men let their hands drop and Ulysses turned, the professor took him by the arm and drew him back.
—But there is something you need to know, Mr. Ulysses. Something that I didn’t put in Billy’s book. In the midst of his travels, when the Great Ulysses visited the underworld and met the ghost of Tiresias, the old soothsayer told him that he was destined to wander the seas until he had appeased the gods through an act of tribute.
Had Woolly been in Ulysses’s position, upon hearing this additional piece of news, he would have felt a great sense of defeat. But Ulysses didn’t seem to. Instead, he nodded his head at the professor, as if this was just as it should be.
—What act of tribute?
—What Tiresias tells Ulysses is that he must take up an oar and carry it into the countryside until he has reached a land so unfamiliar with the ways of the sea that a man in the road will stop to ask: What is that you carry upon your shoulder? At that spot, the Great Ulysses was to plant the oar in the ground in Poseidon’s honor, and thenceforth he would be free.
—An oar . . . , said Ulysses.
—Yes, said the professor excitedly, in the case of the Great Ulysses, an oar. But in your case, it would be something different. Something pertinent to your story, to your years of wandering. Something . . .
The professor began looking about.
—Something like that!
Bending over, Ulysses picked up the heavy piece of iron the professor had pointed to.
—A spike, he said.
—Yes, said the professor, a spike. You must carry that to the place where someone is so unfamiliar with the railways that they ask you what it is, and on that spot, you should hammer it into the ground.
* * *
When Woolly and Billy and Duchess were ready to leave, Professor Abernathe decided to stay behind in order to speak with Ulysses further. Then, just a few minutes after the three of them had gotten in the Cadillac, both Billy and Duchess had fallen asleep. So, as Woolly drove up the West Side Highway toward his sister’s house, he had a moment to himself.
If Woolly were perfectly honest, most of the time he’d rather not have a moment to himself. Moments with other people, he found, were much more likely to be filled with laughter and surprises than moments with oneself. And moments with oneself were more likely to circle inward toward some thought that one didn’t want to be having in the first place. But on this occasion, on this occasion that he found himself with a moment to himself, Woolly welcomed it.
Because it provided him with the opportunity to revisit the day. He began at FAO Schwarz, when he was standing in his favorite spot and his sister had suddenly appeared. Then it was across the street to the Plaza for old times’ sake where they had tea with the panda and retold some of the grand old stories. Upon parting with his sister, finding it to be a lovely day, Woolly had walked all the way to Union Square so he could pay his respects to Abraham Lincoln. Then it was off to the circus, and over the Brooklyn Bridge, and up the Empire State Building where Professor Abernathe had bestowed upon Billy a book filled with blank pages in which to set down his adventures. Then Billy had taken them all to the overgrown elevated, where they had sat around the campfire and listened to the extraordinary exchange between Ulysses and the professor.