Parallel universes

Parallel universes are imagined in 2666 as other Earths that might be reached through hypnosis, but the idea also resonates beyond the embedded adventure tale: it gives shape to impossible memories, unstable perception, and Ansky’s meditations on a universe whose order cannot be trusted. The concept remains unresolved, joining speculative possibility to the book’s wider uncertainty about what can be known.

The Detective’s Theory

In the embedded story, a boy falls in love with a hypnotist who works at a burlesque club. When she disappears, he searches for her and hires a Mexican detective who had served as a soldier under Pancho Villa. The detective believes that numerous Earths exist in parallel universes and that hypnosis can provide access to them. The boy suspects that the detective is swindling him, yet accompanies him in the investigation; the theory is therefore neither established fact nor simply dismissed, but a proposal that draws the skeptical boy into an uncertain search.

A Memory That Breaks Chronology

The boy and detective encounter a Russian beggar shouting in an alley. The beggar says that he fought with Wrangel, fought in Crimea, and was evacuated from Sevastopol on an English ship. The boy asks whether the beggar was present at a battle where he himself was badly wounded. When the beggar confirms it, the boy claims that he was there too. The contradiction is immediate: the beggar points out that the battle took place twenty years earlier, before the boy was born. The parallel-world hypothesis offers a possible frame for this impossible shared past, but the story does not confirm that explanation.

The search leads the boy and detective west to Kansas City, where they find the hypnotist. The boy asks her either to hypnotize him and send him back to the battlefield where he believes he should have died, or to accept his love and stop fleeing. She says neither is possible. The detective, meanwhile, takes an interest in hypnosis and begins telling her a story; the boy leaves the roadside bar and walks beneath the night sky, eventually stopping in the middle of nowhere to cry. The theory of access to other Earths thus becomes entangled with the boy’s desire to return to an imagined past and his inability to recover the woman he loves.

Other Worlds and Uncertain Perception

Elsewhere, Morini’s nightmare makes ordinary space expand into something almost impossible. As Pelletier and Espinoza play cards around a stone table, Norton dives into what initially looks like a hotel pool. People gradually leave through doors between the outdoor area, bar, and suites. Morini sees that his cards give him nothing, leaves them facedown, and struggles to move his wheelchair toward the water. Only at its edge does he recognize the pool’s fantastic scale: he estimates it to be at least a thousand feet wide and more than two miles long. Its dark surface bears oily patches like harbor water, and Norton has vanished. The dream does not identify this immense pool as a parallel universe, but its distortion of familiar space echoes the possibility that the apparent world is not the only one.

The same disturbance of ordinary reality appears in smaller, concrete settings. In the Hotel Mexico, the critics’ rooms are nearly identical but marked by differences: a desert painting in Espinoza’s room, two mirrors facing one another in Norton’s, and a half-moon-shaped chunk missing from Pelletier’s toilet. The damaged porcelain prompts Norton to imagine that someone’s head might have been smashed against it. In Charly Cruz’s house, Fate encounters a bathroom where a narrow coffin-shaped wooden box and an inexplicable marble fixture seem, for an instant, alive; a wall mirror multiplies the space and his own reflected body. These scenes do not establish parallel worlds, but they repeatedly unsettle the distinction between a room as a recognizable place and a space that has become strange or threatening.

Ansky, Chaos, and the Limits of Explanation

In Ansky’s last notes, parallel universes appear beside reflections on the universe’s eventual end. He wonders what will remain when the universe, time, and space have died, answers that nothing will remain, and laughs at the thought. He also remembers the peasants of Kostekino saying that behind every answer lies a more complex question. The idea of other worlds belongs to this restless inquiry: it enlarges the imaginable without supplying a final explanation.

The surrounding history resists any comforting sense of cosmic order. As Hitler invades Poland and the Second World War begins, Ansky dreams that the sky is a great ocean of blood. On the last page of his notebook, he sketches a map to join the guerrillas. Set against that movement from speculative thought to war and action, parallel universes remain less a solved cosmology than a way of registering how unstable reality can feel—and how much remains beyond any single answer.