From the Corner of His Eye

right thing, and in that world, I am redeemed for a while, given a chance to become a better version of the Tom Vanadium who lives on in the other world of the wrong choice. There are so many worlds with imperfect Tom Vanadiums, but always someplace… someplace I'm moving steadily toward a state of grace."
        "Each life," Barty Lampion said, "is like our oak tree in the backyard but lots bigger. One trunk to start with, and then all the branches, millions of branches, and every branch is the same life going in a new direction."
        Surprised, Tom leaned in his chair to look more directly at the blind boy. On the telephone, Celestina had mentioned only that Barty was a prodigy, which didn't quite explain the aptness of the oak-tree metaphor.
        "And maybe," said Agnes, caught up in the speculation, "when your life comes to an end in all those many branches, what you're finally judged on is the shape and the beauty of the tree."
        "Making too many wrong choices," Grace White said, "produces too many branches-a gnarled, twisted, ugly growth."
        "Too few," said Maria, "might mean you made an admirably small number of moral mistakes but also that you failed to take reasonable risks and didn't make full use of the gift of life."
        "Ouch," said Edom, and this earned him loving smiles from Maria, Agnes, and Barty.
        Tom didn't understand Edom's comment or the smiles that it drew, but otherwise, he was impressed by the ease with which these people absorbed what he had said and by the imagination with which they began to expand upon his speculation. It was almost as though they had long known the shape of what he'd told them and that he was only filling in a few confirming details.
        "Tom, a couple minutes ago," Agnes said, "Celestina mentioned your… 'certain awareness.' Which is what exactly?"
        "From childhood, I've had this… awareness, this perception of an infinitely more complex reality than what my five basic senses reveal. A psychic claims to predict the future. I'm not a psychic. Whatever I am… I'm able to feel a lot of the other possibilities inherent in any situation, to know they exist simultaneously with my reality, side by side, each world as real as mine. In my bones, in my blood-"
        "You feel all the ways things are," said Barty.
        Tom looked at Celestina. "Prodigy, huh?"
        Smiling, she said, "Gonna be especially momentous, this day."
        "Yes, Barty," Tom said. "I feel a depth to life, layers beyond layers. Sometimes it's… scary. Mostly it inspires me. I can't see these other worlds, can't move between them. But with this quarter, I can prove that what I feel isn't my imagination." He extracted a quarter from a jacket pocket, holding it between thumb and forefinger for all but Barty to see. "Angel?"
        The girl looked up from her coloring book.
        Tom said, "Do you like cheese?"
        "Fish is brain food, but cheese tastes better."
        "Have you ever eaten Swiss cheese?"
        "Velveeta's best. "
        "What's the first thing comes to your mind when you think of Swiss cheese?"
        "Cuckoo clocks."
        "What else?"
        "Sandwiches."
        "What else?"
        "Velveeta."
        "Barty," Tom said, "help me here."
        "Holes," Barty said.
        "Oh, yeah, holes," Angel agreed.
        "Forget Barty's tree for a second and imagine that all these many worlds are like stacked slices of Swiss cheese. Through some holes, you can see only the next slice. Through others, you see through two or three or five slices before holes stop overlapping. There are little holes between stacked worlds, too, but they're constantly shifting, changing, second by second. And I can't see them, really, but I have an uncanny feel for them. Watch closely."
        This time he didn't flip the quarter straight into the air. He tipped his hand, and with his thumb, he shot the coin toward Agnes.
        At the midpoint of the table, directly under the chandelier, the flashing silvery disc turned through the air, turned, turned, turned out of this world into another.
        A few gasps and exclamations. A sweet giggle and applause from Angel. The reactions were surprisingly mild.
        "Usually, I throw out a bunch of hocus-pocus, flourishes and patter, to distract people, so they don't even realize that what they've seen was real. They think the midair disappearance is just a