Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers

I went home and changed clothes and caught the bus to school, and what with not really having adjusted to working nights, and being tired, and having to think about schoolwork, I was pretty much convinced that the whole thing had been some weird dream. So I came home, slept through until about eleven, then got up and went to work again.

And damn, it was almost the same, except that there weren’t any half-naked women this time. The normal truckers and the rest came in first, then they faded out, and the weirdos started turning up. At sixteen, you know, you think you can cope with anything. At least, I did. So I didn’t let the customers bother me, not even the ones who didn’t look like they were exactly human beings to begin with. Harry got used to me being there, and I did make it a lot easier on him, so after the first couple of weeks it was pretty much settled that I could stay on for as long as I liked.

It was fun, really, seeing just what would turn up there and order a burger. I think my favorite was the guy who walked in, no car, no lights, no nothing, wearing this electric blue hunter’s vest with wires all over it, and these medieval tights with what Harry called a codpiece, with snow and some kind of sticky goop all over his vest and in his hair, shivering like it was the Arctic out there, when it was the middle of July. He had some kind of little animal crawling around under that vest, but he wouldn’t let me get a look at it; from the shape of the bulge it made it might have been a weasel or something. He had the strangest damn accent you ever heard, but he acted right at home and ordered without looking at the menu.

Harry admitted, when I’d been there awhile, that he figured anyone else would mess things up for him somehow. I might have thought I was going nuts, or I might have called the cops, or I might have spread a lot of strange stories around, but I didn’t, and Harry appreciated that.

Hey, that was easy. If these people didn’t bother Harry, I figured, why should they bother me? And it wasn’t anybody else’s business, either. When people asked, I used to tell them that sure, we got weirdos in the place late at night — but I never said just how weird.

And I never got as cool about it as Harry was; I mean, a flying saucer in the parking lot wouldn’t make Harry blink. I blinked, when we got ’em — we did, but not very often, and I had to really work not to stare at them. Most of the customers had more sense; if they came in something strange they hid it in the woods or something. But there were always a few who couldn’t be bothered. If any state cops ever cruised past there and saw those things, I guess they didn’t dare report them. No one would’ve believed them anyway.

I asked Harry once if all these guys came from the same place.

“Damned if I know,” he said. He’d never asked, and he didn’t want me to, either.

Except he was wrong about thinking that would scare them away. Sometimes you can tell when someone wants to talk, and some of these people did. So I talked to them.

I think I was seventeen by the time someone told me what was really going on, though.

Before you ask any stupid questions, no, they weren’t any of them Martians or monsters from outer space or anything like that. Some of them were from West Virginia, in fact. Just not our West Virginia. Lots of different West Virginias, instead. What the science fiction writers call “parallel worlds”. That’s one name, anyway. Other dimensions, alternate realities, they had lots of different names for it.

It all makes sense, really. A couple of them explained it to me. See, everything that ever could possibly have happened, in the entire history of the universe right from the Big Bang up until now, did happen — somewhere. And every possible difference means a different universe. Not just if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, or won, or whatever he didn’t do here; what does Napoleon matter to the universe, anyway? Betelgeuse doesn’t giving a flying damn for all of Europe, past, present, or future. But every single atom or particle or whatever, whenever it had a chance to do something — break up or stay together, or move one direction instead of another, whatever — it did all of them, but all in different universes. They didn’t branch off, either — all the universes were always there, there just wasn’t any difference between them until this particular event came along. And that means that there are millions and millions of identical universes, too, where the differences haven’t happened yet.