Albert Roth At Age Thirteen

He wasn't paying attention. He was looking down at his feet, making sure that none of the steps he took touched a crack. Step on a crack, break your mother's back, the children's rhyme went. He knew it wasn't true; but still, he had to be sure. Walking on a crack was bad.

So he wasn't paying attention when the car hit him. The driver of the car wasn't paying attention either. He had been called to pick up a friend from a bar - the friend obviously couldn't drive, due to his inebration, having become stinking drunk due to being recently fired. So he had called his friend, who drove over to the bar and picked him up. His friend - the driver of the car that hit Albert Roth - then began to drive back to his inebriated friend's apartment.

The timing was uncanny. Just as Albert stepped across the street, making sure not to walk over any cracks, the car turned the corner and the inebriated friend started to making a sound that corresponded to vomiting. The driver of the car - having just recently cleaned the interior - didn't want his inebriated friend to vomit within the car, so turned to him and tried to get him to open the window, in an attempt to make the fresh air calm his stomach or to provide an escape for any vomit, if need be.

So the driver wasn't looking when Albert stepped off the curb and he wasn't looking when he car hit Albert in the side of the chest and knocked him foward. The driver did, however, deduce what had happened immediately afterwards, close enough to stop the car and prevent further injury to Albert.

Albert, however, was already quite injured. Beside the cracked ribs, he had hit his head on the pavement and, later on, the doctors would declare that he had a subdural hematoma.

The accident, however, caused something else to happen to Albert: as he hit his head, as he stared above at the sky, he saw what he believed was the Aleph. He saw all things.

He saw into every timeline. He saw his brother Zeke. He saw all the things he had done and hadn't done, saw all the decisions he made and didn't make, saw every branch, every tree, every point in his timeline until them.

And he saw that none of them were real.

He did not exist.

He was merely a fiction, a character in a story.

It would be a story he would try to rewrite. He would try until he died.