Paul led Eric and I down another set of stairs and through a white hallway punctuated with paintings of stark Scandinavian-looking landscapes in unearthly colors. He stopped at the entrance to an exhibition called, "Distortions: Memory as Fiction."

In the first room, there was a quote written on one wall:

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

                    ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The opposite wall was covered in paired photographs ranging from older square-shaped black and white photos, to ones in muted tones from probably the fifties through the eighties, to more recent pictures in full color. In the first pair of black and white images, a boy posing with a dog in front of a Christmas tree appears in the next photo on a front porch in the exact same clothes and position. In another, a woman caught by surprise looks over her shoulder at the photographer with her mouth slightly open as if she's about to speak. In the photo on the right she's at a kitchen sink in front of a window, in the other, she's outside and there is a lake in the distance.

A placard with the artist's statement read: "A Series of Potentially Misremembered Moments (2016) is a collection of photographic prints drawn from used camera cards purchased on eBay and unclaimed family photo albums from estate sales and storage unit auctions. The works in this series feature moments unlikely to have been remembered without photographic evidence, captured only to be later discarded. With the utilization of juxtaposed images, one of which contains the subject in their original setting and the other featuring the subject in an equally realistic but ultimately inaccurate setting, the series questions the reality and meaning of the mundane."

The painting around the corner was so much larger and more vivid than the wall of snapshots that it was startling. In it, Curious George ran from the man with the yellow hat, holding a jar of peanut butter with a bold red, blue and green striped label. Mickey Mouse had his arm around the Monopoly man, while they watched the scene play out. All of the images seemed to jump out from the white background they were on and implant directly into my brain.

"Jiffy peanut butter," Eric mumbled. "That's the kind we get."

"That's impossible," Paul said. "Because it doesn't exist. Those are all examples of the Mandela Effect."

"What's that?" Eric asked.

"A false memory or belief held by many people. Like that Curious George has a tail, Mickey Mouse wears suspenders, or that the Monopoly Man has a monocle, all of which are untrue. Obviously these examples," he gestured toward the characters in the painting, "are just mind tricks. But apparently there are people all over the world who claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, when he actually was released from prison in 1990 and died in 2013. Some people believe the Mandela Effect is evidence that alternate timelines exist."

"Are you some people?" I asked. "Do you think there are alternate timelines?"

"Ha!" Paul's sudden burst of a laugh filled the small room and made Eric and I jump in surprise. "I know there are."

The next room was empty except for three benches, and completely dark until a projector overhead beamed a video onto a blank wall.

We sat and watched a woman describe how ever since her son passed away as a child, she felt as though she lived two separate lives: the one based in reality, where her son was gone, and another in her mind, where she imagined him going through middle school and high school, graduating and going to college. Every single day, she imagined what he'd be doing, from moments of triumph, like winning a high school basketball game, to sadness like experiencing his first heartbreak, to the mundane, like playing video games with his friends or leaving for his after-school job at a fast food restaurant.

Then a younger woman appeared on the screen. "I have no reliable memories of my older brother," she said. "Everything I think I remember about him is likely a combination of stories my relatives tell and photographs I've seen. When my mom told me how he lived each day in her head, I decided to bring him out, just for one day."

She went on to describe how she used age progression imaging and video editing to include her brother in a family gathering on Belle Isle one summer day, when he would have been twenty-six years old.

In the video, smoke rises from a grill and at least thirty people of all ages are sitting at picnic tables with plastic covers, or nearby on folding camping chairs, snacking on potato chips and drinking pop. As the person recording the video walks around, people smile and give a quick wave or scoff and shoo her away. There's a playground nearby and kids climb a faux rock wall and shriek as they fly down a miniature zip line. Loud hip-hop music plays from a huge speaker someone brought in a wagon. The landscape is green, shrubby and overgrown, and the Detroit river sparkles in the background.

It only lasted about a minute, then the mother was back on the screen. "Most people who watch this wouldn't notice any difference. But I cried tears of joy when I saw it. He was there, pushing his niece on a swing with one hand, smiling at his phone in the other. It's so realistic. As a young man he would have been half present with his family, but also making plans with friends or liking a Snapchat or whatever." A huge grin spread across her face.

Then it cut to her daughter. "It might seem a little weird, or creepy even, to some people. But if it brings her peace, why can't there be a world where he experienced all the things he should have?"

Eric cleared his throat when I looked over at him and saw him wiping his eyes. "Sorry," he grumbled. "I'm so tired, I can't even right now."

I hooked my arm through his and squeezed his hand.

"Okay," Paul said as he stood, "We can go straight to the last one."

We quickly passed through three more small rooms, to another photography exhibit. Large photographs taken throughout the life of a vaguely familiar politician lined the walls, along with another quote.

"My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

                     -Sen. Edward Kennedy

"In some experiments, after seeing altered photographs of political events that never happened, a surprising percentage of people claimed to remember the events in the photographs, up to sixty-eight percent in one case." Paul crossed his arms and frowned as he evaluated the photos. "I wanted to create an entire political career that never happened, or never continued, anyway.

"My older sister was born on the day Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and she grew up to be a bit obsessed with him and his life, and especially what might have been different if he'd survived."

"Are you talking about J.F.K.?" I interrupted.

"No, I'm talking about his brother, Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated during his presidential campaign in 1968." He scowled as he took in the dumbfounded expression on my face and said, "For someone who visits the past, you don't seem to know much about it."

"Yeah, I know! I've had, like, one history class."

"You don't need school to learn things. It's not like all the knowledge and information in the world is locked up in university libraries and you only get access to it when you pay tuition." He sighed before he went on, "Anyway, my sister, Joana, thought that if Bobby Kennedy had lived he would have become president and we'd live in a completely different world. That he would have started with ending the war in Vietnam, listened to scientists who warned of climate change and taken action, and worked tirelessly until poverty was eliminated.

"Anyway, it didn't quite work out that way. I called in a bomb threat a few minutes before he was supposed to speak at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. on the night he was shot and he made his speech from a different location. He survived an assassination attempt one month later, ended his presidential campaign to focus on his recovery, and spent the rest of his life as a Senator."

Then the echo of Mick Jagger's voice snarled in my ears.

"I might have been in that one," I muttered. "He was supposed to say, 'Who killed the Kennedys?' But he said, 'Who killed Jack Kennedy?' Were we in some alternate timeline?"

Paul nodded as a grin crept across his face.

I rubbed my temples. "But which one is real?"

"What if they both are?"

"Like the multiverse?" Eric asked.

"But where, instead of timelines branching out infinitely with each action or decision and never intersecting, they converge. In the same way that there can be multiple paths that arrive at the same destination." Paul's eyes lit up with excitement. "Like déjà vu. One theory is that the experience of déjà vu is when parallel universes interact and possibly influence each other. What if you arrived in 1993 at a convergence point, the day R.F.K. died?"

"It was on the news," I remembered. "He was the Senator they were talking about."

"Are you sure you're remembering that correctly?" Paul propped his chin on his palm and attempted a comically puzzled expression.

I growled in frustration. "From what I read before, in this theoretical multiverse, the very act of traveling back in time creates a new timeline. If that's the case why did certain people remember me in 1953 each time I returned, if each time should have been the first time I saw him...them?"

"If alternate timelines weave back together," Paul speculated, "maybe some of the new timelines we've created converged quickly while others took years to arrive at the same point.

"With your grandparents, you created a new timeline and some things changed. Your grandma ended up living a few more years, she had a different preferred way to get exercise, and you have memories you didn't have before. Not to sound harsh, but what changed overall? Eventually both your grandparents died. I assume neither of them did anything to dramatically change the course of humankind. Maybe everything winds up the same in the end."

"So why bother trying to change anything?" I wondered aloud.

"No, still keep trying. I do." Paul scratched underneath his hat and scrunched his face up in thought. "That day in Detroit at the gas station, I wanted to keep you away from Liz because I knew that you were going to do what you did tonight. You gave her a chance to fix what she did wrong, and not everyone gets that." He shrugged apologetically and said, "That's it. You can go now."

He led Eric and I back to the door and followed us into the parking lot a few steps.

Paul handed me a business card with the name of the gallery on it.  There was a name, a phone number and a date in December handwritten on the back.

"Ethan Sanborn?" I read aloud. "Is that your real name?"

"One of them," he grinned. "You should come to the opening."

~~~~~~

When Eric shook me awake we were parked in the driveway at my dad's house. It didn't seem so long ago that he was dropping me off just before dawn at the end of another epic night.

"My dad and stepmom aren't home," I said sleepily. "Where do your parents think you are right now?"

"Drew's house." He yawned and stretched, straightening his arms as he pressed his palms to the steering wheel.

The house was empty and even though it would be daylight soon, I didn't really want to be alone.

"You can sleep on the couch if you want," I offered. "If it might be weird if you show up at home this early."

"Thanks, Ness. I think I'll take you up on that."

I set him up with a spare pillow and some blankets and he fell asleep immediately. The sound of Eric's sleep breathing was comforting in the too-quiet house, so instead of going up to my bedroom, I curled up with a blanket on the recliner in the same room as him.

When I woke hours later after a dreamless sleep, he was gone.