Sky Magenta

"It will be fuchsia."
"But I want it water green!"
"This month is mine to decide, you will have it water green or even antimony yellow if you want it, but next month."
"But I…."
"Enough. Fuchsia it is."

The light at the end of the tunnel faded from a bright white into the colors of the world and he saw something he would never expected to see: the face of a woman covered by a surgical mask. He felt drowning from the liquid stuck in his lungs, and that was strange, because he didn't die by drowning, but in a hospital bed. I'm still alive, after all, he thought. Twenty-nine years were a young age to die, even for someone like him with a nasty disease; he was partially relieved, despite the promise of more suffering ahead.
It took some time to him to notice something was off. Proportions. Everything seemed too big, and when the nurse took him in her arms and lifted him with a single had, he finally knew it wasn't the morphine making him delusional: he was naked, wed, he weighted four kilos and he was about forty centimeters tall. And he didn't have a belly button yet.
Paolo was shocked: did he just reincarnate? He thought it would have needed more time, like, maybe settling down for a time in the underworld before his soul had traveled into a new body, but why did he remember his previous life anyway? He passively went through the torture the nurse put him through: freeing his lungs from the amniotic, cut his umbilical cord, washing and wrapping him into a blanket, locking a name bracelet on him. There, he found out that there was something else wrong.
Paolo Mercalli
His old name. Again?
"Ma'am, here's your little boy..."
The nurse put the toddler into his mother's arms, and Paolo recognized her, despite she was considerably younger than he remembered: she was his mom, his old mom, not a complete stranger that just happened to give  birth to his soul's new vessel.
That vessel was tired. He fell asleep immediately.

"I think we should have make some more variations..."
"We agreed to change only one variable at the time."
"Yes but this... I mean... fuchsia!"
"Fuchsia is just fine."
"But the studies on chromatic influences from the environment..."
"They did it, not us. You know how blind they are when it comes to science, and that how much we are influencing it..."
"Oh, fine... but next month you'll see that it works better with water green!"
"Oh, please..."

The world looked exactly how Paolo remembered it, with the sole exception of light. It was strange, psychedelic, maybe. He thought at first he had some problem on his eyes, or maybe that's how toddlers see (he didn't remember how he used to see when he was three days old, that's for sure). When they brought him to his mother all dressed up in a fancy suit, he understood that they were going to discharge him.
The nurse placed him carefully in the stroller and he muttered a "thanks" without thinking, but it was difficult to talk without teeth and with that huge, deformed face.
The nurse and his mother were staring at him in astonishment nonetheless.
"Did you talk, little one?" his mother joked, but her eyes were wide and worried.
Paolo smiled, and talked again, thinking they wouldn't have understand him if he did, with that swollen face and cheeks, but he heard himself saying with a high pitched voice "I t'ied. Is diffult 'taut teef."
He laughed at himself: that was plainly ridiculous, and his mother's face... and the nurse's. He heard his father muttering over his head "I don't know if he's a genius or a monster."
"Auways chee'y, uhn, dad?" he muttered. His mom glanced over him, and he saw her chuckle.
"Barely a week old and he already knows you..." she said.
They didn't talk anymore while they were bringing him outside, and he realized that he had made a mistake by talking. People are supposed to babble incoherent sound when they're a week old, but he had already decided: he couldn't live his life like this, he wasn't normal, and his parents will have to cope with that. Once in the open he finally understood what was wrong with the light: despite the sun still being yellow, the sky was a bright, flashing fuchsia...

"Maybe we've got a problem."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that we may have to stop and start over. There was an error during the reset phase.
"Oh no, deary. We're running this from five days already, I don't want my month to turn out a February. It's my month, we go on with it."
"There may be consequences..."
"Locate the singularity, I'll take care of the rest. I'm busy with the D.D.R., right now..."

School was excruciatingly boring for Paolo. For one that had the fortune of getting his language studies degree just seven years before - from his point of view - with a thesis about romance language philology, primary school was a torture. His teacher didn't know if she had to be proud of that smart boy sitting in her class or unsettled by his apathetic look, too mature for a eight year old boy, and by his strange ability to predict the future.
"Paolo, want to read us the next part?" she asked.
"Fine.." he sighed while he looked on the page with boredom written all over his face. He definitely hated that passage from We Always Wore Sailors Suits, the autobiography of Susanna Agnelli, sister of Gianni Agnelli, founder of the FIAT group. He had found it in every bloody Italian literature anthology from primary to high school, and every single bloody one of his professors had made him read it, sooner or later. He was sick of it. He read it fast, without any particular expression in his voice but impatience, tripping into some alliteration or some consonants passages. He wasn't used on his milk teeth yet.
"So..." she said once he finished and closed the book with a slam. "What did you get from this passage?"
He glanced at her rising a brow with an "Are you kidding me?" look.
"So?" she insisted trying to encourage him.
"You want to know if I had understood the single sentences or you want me to talk about the general sense of this passage?"
"Er..." she looked at him puzzled, "Whatever you prefer..."
That was it. He was sick tired of wasting his time, so he decided to play a bit: "This is a common example of autobiographic text, memories that usually won't be interesting for anyone but the person that writes them down, but since they belong to famous people - or in this case to a person that has famous relatives - they appeal to the reader's gossip thirst. The reason they put this into a school book is because it's a fair portrait of how they used to live back in those days, but since the Agnelli were disgustingly rich it's not much of a representation of that time's society, if not the upper middle classes. I prefer Gavino Ledda's Father and Master or Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings, myself."
His classmates looked at him in shock, the teacher looked disoriented.
"You want me to repeat that as a eight years old kid?" he asked with a grin.
"You are a eight years old kid!" she cried on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"I meant the stereotype of a eight years old kid." Paolo rebuffed. He started feeling guilty, it was not his teacher's fault if he was stuck there.
"What's a steerotip?"  Andrea asked. He was Paolo's best friend, once, but in his present life he just found him annoying. Well, it wasn't his fault if he acted so childish...
"Uhm well... it's sort of what people expect you to be. Like... if you imagine a thief, you imagine him with a black mask, but not all thieves wear a black mask. The thief with a black mask is a stereotype, something that helps us imagining something. It applies to behavior as well: we imagine always a mom like someone that cooks, but not all mom cook: some work, some doesn't like it, some just can't, like mine. It's a sort of an example that applies for everything but it's not always true."
"I think I got that." Andrea replied frowning. He kept muttering the new learned word under his breath, making Paolo smile when he sometimes glanced at him in awe.

"Did you find it?"
"No, but I'm getting closer: it's on the northern hemisphere."
"Hurry, then..."

"Honestly, Paolo..." the teacher said, "I understand you're a smart boy, and maybe we're going too slow for you, but why don't you try a jump to skip some years? Try the fifth class, get the degree and go to the junior high..."
Paolo looked around the empty room. He never get outside during the break, and according to his teacher this had an impact on his social life. She didn't imagine it was the other way around: he didn't go outside playing in the field because he couldn't stand his classmates and the other kids of his age.
"I'd be stuck anyway, miss." he finally said, "There's the scholar obligation until thirteen, and I can't do the high school finals until I'm eighteen if I skip a year. The law keeps me from doing it."
"And how do you know the law" she asked knowing that he was telling the truth.
"I've read it some time ago." he restrained himself from saying it was at high school, about fifteen years before.
"Paolo, I want to help you, but I think you're keeping something from me."
"If I would tell you what I keep hiding from you, my parents and the whole world, I'd be in a hospital, recovering from a psychosis."
"Try me." she said.
Paolo looked into her eyes, and the feelings he held for that woman returned. In his previous life she was like a mother, a caring teacher that taught him everything he knew... well, not everything, but the most important things: how to read, how to do the maths, how to love to learn and how you will always learn, even when you're teaching. He sighed and finally spilled it out: "As we're in 1989 I could even prove what I'm saying, in a matter of time. I remember things starting in these years, the fall of the Wall of Berlin, the start of the war in Yugoslavia, the Gulf War in three years now... no, wait, four... thing is I am eight, but I remember all my life up to twenty five, when I died. I didn't tell this to my parents, but when I died I was just... reborn. Not reincarnated, but I just started all my life from scratch." he paused looking at the absolute horrified expression on his teacher's face. "...And I'd rather keep my parents not knowing. I don't want to tell them I have seen my father die or my brother's incident..."
"You don't have a brother."
"Half brother. My mother doesn't know it yet. This was the incident." he chuckled thinking about how upset was his mother at first, when Claudio showed up, learning that her husband had a son with another woman, and how they grew close to each other to the point his mother considered him a son of hers more than his father did. "It's a matter of weeks, now."
"You talked about the wall of Berlin, a war in Yugoslavia... another war somewhere in four years... are these things that are going to happen?"
"Yes. The cold war will end, but..." he stopped abruptly.
"...But?" he was listening closer.
"Do you really believe me?" Paolo asked.
"I... I don't know, it's absurd, but I got a feeling of dejà-vu when you told me those things... you know what dejà-vu means, don't you?"
"Please, I've got a language degree." he said frowning. "If you really believe me you better start considering me as a twenty-nine years old man, not a eight years old kid."
"Technically you should be thirty-seven, then."
He shrugged: "I don't know if this counts. I'm not improving,. I'm not... growing, just getting back where I was... that's why I am trying to follow my previous steps as close as I can."
"You don't want to change it? Why?"
"Because..." he paused. It was difficult to explain it with words: "If I stick to the things I know I did and I know they happened, I can control this thing.I can know what's going to happen to me, right? If I change my life... or even history... I couldn't know... I always wished I could see the future, and now I'm reliving my own past..."
"And it's all the same as it was? All how you remember it?"
"Not exactly..." he glanced at the window. He wasn't used yet to that ugly color outside, it made him nervous.
"What do you mean? What changed?"
"Well, as long as I remember, history - at least recent history - is the same: we got the world war, the atomic bomb, the fascism, the Shoa, Italy was unified in 1861, America was discovered in 1492... it looks all the same but for one thing: the sky I remembered was blue."
"Blue?" his teacher chuckled, "A blue sky... that must have been a sight..."

"It's in the eighties of twentieth century... Up to the first decade of 2k. We're close."
"It's a hot spot, very interesting."
"Are you really sure you don't want to stop it?"
"We've gone so far, let's just finish this run. It's getting interesting."

"Are you sure you don't want to try?"
Paolo felt it was strange to look at Martina in such a cold way. When he was at the high school (the first time) he had a huge crush on her, that lasted from the first to the last year. He never managed to tell her and she didn't look interested in him, anyway. Well, at that time he wasn't doing any sport (he quit swimming after junior high, but in his new life he managed to continue, and now he had built a nice physique), he used to dress like a tramp (he would have learned how to combine two clothes only once he started university) and he didn't had all those money he had now, thanks to all the toys, comics and LPs he had bought during his childhood and he was now able to place in the collector's market for a price that was ten times what he paid for them. And now he had the chance to enjoy this for more than the remaining thirteen years he had left to live. That first cigarette had led him to smoke, smoke a lot, and develop his cancer.
"I'd start smoking immediately, better if I don't try it. I'm a swimmer, I need all my lungs."
"Bo-ring..." Martina sighed while taking a drag from her own cigarette, "Always the good guy..."
"Are you sure smoke doesn't bother you?" Cristina asked while throwing away her half-smoked cigarette. Paolo had noticed she tried not to smoke when he was around, from some time. He shook his head.
"You're a passive smoker, then." Martina laughed. She was right, he liked the smell of tobacco and the smoke he breathed around them didn't annoy him, it was more like a pleasant memory. Cigarette's smoke still triggered something in him, but his body didn't need nicotine anymore, and he didn't want to spoil it this time.
"I must have been a smoker in my past life." he joked.
"Can you give me a sky marker?" Martina asked while resuming working over the presentation panels they were completing. "I told you sky color, this is azure..." she said looking at the marker Paolo handed her absent-minded.
"I'll never get used to this." he muttered while checking for a strong magenta marker in the pencil case.
"To what? Are you color-blind?" Cristina was getting closer and Paolo looked at her in astonishment, trying not to laugh. God, she was flirting with him? That was hilarious! In his first life he never managed to tell Martina about his feelings, but she definitely knew, and so did Cristina. And as Cristina and Martina were best friends - and ultimate bitches - they usually took advantage of him for every favor they may have needed, but mostly they enjoyed torturing him by teasing and taunting him. And now it looked like Cristina, ("Cristina the bitch!") had a huge crush on him. He held his breath wondering if she had it also in his... their past life. Maybe he was just cooler and definitely more interesting now than twenty-nine years ago: he got the look, he got the money, he got the attitude, he got the style... he wasn't an awkward teen anymore, but maybe - maybe - all the teasing and the taunting was a sort of revenge on him, jealousy, for he was in love with her best friend?
"It could be..." he muttered.
"What?" she asked tilting her head towards him. She was getting closer.
"Nothing." Paolo shook his head and smiled to himself. He used to hate Cristina because how she treated him, and in the end he came to hate Martina as well, also for having offered him that first cigarette that had led him to his premature death. But now that he got his second chance, wasn't just right to offer one to them as well? He wasn't interested in Martina anymore, he liked women of his own age - as in twenty-nine - or slightly older, not teens, it felt just wrong to him, but Cristina had something... her hair, her scent, her smile, so sweet now that it wasn't poisoned with bitter cruelty... maybe not now, but in some year...

"Found it! It's in Italy."
"Too bad."
"What do you mean, too bad?"
"Too late for the attack at the pope and too far for New York..."
"The deviations from the previous schemes are concentrated into a small area in central Italy..."
"Even worse. Nothing happens there."
"It's a male individual. I can't locate him yet, he moves too fast. I just have his ID, but he already changed his life, minor things, but the effect is expanding, cascading..."
"That's likely. The World runs just like the previous ones, under every aspect but Italy... that's unsettling."
"Why?"
"Because these are the only changes from the previous run in every era."
"So it's him who causes them, don't you think? What's the next level?"
"What do you mean?"
"He's growing, and gathering power, and he knows... don't you think that he will at least try to change something? Maybe a tragedy that has affected all the world and the following history with his consequences?"
"Which one do you mean?"
"The closest one."

He did it.
It was easy, actually, he just hid the car keys in his room, Claudio had to bring him to the airport with his own car. He struggled, waiting for his brother to return, wondering if he did cause his death as well, but when the door opened and Claudio put the keys in the basket by the door he sighed in relief.
"He's on the plane. He said he'll call when he arrives."
When he finally called, that evening, Paolo was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"Dad?" he asked anxiously, picking up the phone the moment it rang.
"Hi Paolo. I just reached the hotel, trip went smooth, just a little tired. Is mom there?"
"Yes, I'll..." he covered the microphone and started sobbing. For a moment he thought he had failed, that that was the police or the embassy calling because his plane had crashed or he had a stroke while on the plane, that he was meant to die today and nothing, even him, couldn't have change that. But he was there, alive, on the other side of the planet, in a hotel in New York, and he was breathing, talking, living...
Mom was yelling that she had found the keys of the car, the car in which his father died on his way to the airport, twenty-nine years ago. He turned and spotted Claudio frozen on the door.
"What is it, what happened?" he asked concerned. Paolo couldn't help wondering if Claudio had one of those deja-vu miss Giovanna, his primary school teacher, told him about, if he remembered, somewhere in the very back of his mind, that today dad was meant to die.
"Nothing. Here..." he handed him the phone, "It's dad, I'll go call mom..."
He wiped his tears and smile while calling his mother.

"Ouch."
"What?"
"Great variation, on the other side of the planet... they found them."
"Who?"
"New York hijackers. I'm comparing..."
"It's a cascade effect or the effect of warning?"
"I don't know. There's someone out of place... no, wait it's someone that wasn't there in the previous cycles..."
"Let me see... last month he was already dead by then."
"Another anomaly? Can it be that he generated it?"
"You think he did it on purpose?"
"I don't know what to think..."

On September 11 2001, Paolo was nervous and zapping the TV all day long. He knew what was about to happen, and he was wondering if he could have done anything to stop it. He had felt this way before: during the war in Sarajevo, the Gulf War, the murder of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino... all things he remembered but couldn't reach, couldn't stop, this was just another one. He kept zapping but the news didn't appear. He stared at the TV frowning and turned it off, then he started his computer and logged on the internet with his dial-up modem (he wished DSL connections were cheaper like they used to in his past life, or his father would have never agreed to get one...) and checked the hours on the East Coast and the CNN site, along with other online news. When he didn't find anything he looked up at the clock again and even checked the date: it was supposed to happen hours before. Both the towers of the World Trade Center in New York should have been "Ground Zero" now.
What the hell happened?
He had dinner and went to bed thinking about all the possibilities: it was delayed? Someone else knew, like he did? The next morning the most interesting news was the new government crisis, and the lame joke the Italian president had told at the European Union parliament.
Paolo smiled. The world was changing.
"What's up?" his father asked him.
"Nothing." he said.
"Aunt Rita is coming for dinner" his mom said, "Were you supposed to see Cristina tonight?"
Paolo nodded: "She has her last exam today, so we wanted to go out and celebrate somewhere..."
"You can celebrate here." his mother said casually, "You've been dating her for years, don't you think it's time to officially introduce her to us?"
"You know her." Paolo smiled. Sometimes his mother was so old fashioned...
"Aunt Rita doesn't. Be a good boy and ask her when you see her today, just text me before six to tell me if both of you will be here for dinner."
He nodded, then grabbed his bag and stepped out to go to the university, waving at his brother while he was crawling into the kitchen looking for coffee. Yes, the world had changed, somehow he had managed to make it better. He had abandoned the trail of his past life, now things were completely different: he was healthy, he had new friends, new hobbies, a girlfriend, a father... and now this. He couldn't help to wonder what would have happened now: without 9/11 there wouldn't have been the war in Afghanistan and Iraq? Was the economic crisis going to hit anyway? Were the riots in North Africa going to start? Was London going to host the Olympic games of 2012? He didn't know anymore, life from now on would have been full of surprises, and he felt a great weight lifted off his shoulders while he took his first step out in this brand new world.
Out in the unknown.

"I have him. You want him?"
"I'd wait a little more..."
"We're at the end of the month... I don't know how it will end... he could avoid the self-destruction, this time..."
"I told you, the fuchsia sky brings good luck..."
"You know it wasn't the fuchsia sky. We must be sure."
"I've never heard of a scientist that interrogates a guinea pig, but... bring him here."

Paolo felt himself dragged away by an unrelenting force, it started from his solar plexus and pulled him up, the very same sensation he felt last time, when he died. But he wasn't dying, this time, he was waiting for his soon-to-be wife to enter the church! This time he didn't see any tunnel of bright light, just two huge strange beings, with a vague humanoid form, looking at him through a fuchsia fog.

"Where am I?"
"He doesn't look anything... special." She said.
"Who are you?"
"But this mess was his doing. He wasn't reset before we put him back into the World." He said.
"Reset... WAIT A MINUTE!"
Both beings stood silent and turned to him.
"So it's you... you did... what are you? Gods? Guardians of the cosmic balance? Some... people who take care of reincarnation?"
"We're not gods" She said in a scoff, "We're scientists."
"That." He said, "we try to create the Perfect World."
"The per..." Paolo turned around and saw. The whole universe in a glove box... it was something his mind denied to acknowledge.
"See..." She started to explain, "Time flows faster for little beings, and slower for the wider ones. Here, the whole history of your planet lasts just one month."
"...Every time." He pointed out.
"So every month we just try to find the right and just combination to make you a perfect world to live in." She concluded ignoring him.
"At first it was a mess, then we learned how to change only one element in the equation of existence and one only every time. It helps to keep control over it, and we take turns to choose what to change."
"Change?" Paolo cried, "Every time? How many times have we lived our lives?"
"That's the 2.011th rerun." He said looking at his pad. "Not counting the beta runs... we couldn't get past the dinosaurs extinction... took three months to figure out how to make the asteroid crash without wiping out all life on your planet."
"This month was my turn to choose the variable." She said with a smile ignoring His last comments. "We decided to work on the sky color, because honestly, that blue was boring... And I managed to achieve the best results so far. The planet didn't turn into a barren waste by the end of 2030!"
"...But I think it wasn't the fuchsia sky." He said, "I think it was you."
"Me?" Paolo shivered.
"Your memory wasn't reset this time, so you were able to change something, something you probably didn't like in your previous life, the one you remembered. It was this knowledge that allowed you to turn your world into a better one..."
"I... I didn't..." Paolo sighed. "I tried to stick to my old life as long as I could, I just... well, I didn't start smoking and saved my father. I know something happened, because there wasn't the attack on New York on September 11 2001, but I don't think I have anything to do with it..."
"You... you didn't stop the 9/11 attack?"
"No. I had liked to, but how could I? There were so many things that I remembered and couldn't stop...Don't you think I'd have started with something nearer to me? After all I live on the other side of the planet..."
He and She looked at each other puzzled.
"Then how..." She asked.
"Wait..." He browsed to some reports on his pad, and then he pointed out a line: "He said he saved his father, I think that's it! It was... Yes! I can't believe it: it was a butterfly effect if I ever see one! He saved his father, his father went to the U.S.A., he took a cab that was taken by another guy in the other Worlds, and that lead to..." he continued listing a series of coincidences that lead to the C.I.A. stopping the 9/11 attack by arresting the terrorists that hijacked the airplanes. "I can't believe it!" He finally said.
"So... he is the right variable, not the fuchsia sky." She said in a bitter disappointment.
"And the chain reaction continued... by saving his father, he didn't let 9/11 happen... without that there was no war in Afghanistan, and without that there was no..." He hesitated looking at Paolo, he probably was about to tell too much. "We have to be sure, though." He added.
"How?" She asked.
"Well this month is my turn... we're back to blue, and he..."
"He?"
"No reset for him."
"But this way he will remember about us as well!" She protested.
"I didn't say that..."

The light at the end of the tunnel faded once again over the nurse's face. Paolo stared crying in desperation: for the third time he had to start all over again.
Out of the windows the Sun was shining.
At least, the sky was blue again...