Teddy took back his board, signaling the end of the evening’s exercise. “You said that other realities were all around you. What did you mean by that?”

I shrugged. “All around means all around. Left and right, front and back . . .”

“How about above and below?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but realized I had no response for that. I never exactly looked up in Elsewhere, and other than sensing that swirling abyss of death, I didn’t look down either.

“I . . . don’t know,” I said.

Teddy gave his broad mischievous grin. “I’m not surprised. You play your sport on a gridiron. You might live in a three-dimensional world, but gravity makes it a two-dimensional game. You never think about what’s beneath the turf or what’s miles above your head, do you?”

“It’s not part of the game—”

“But what if it was?”

I tried to imagine that. Linemen emerging from the ground to pull the quarterback down. Passes that could foul the engines of airplanes. Flying backs instead of running backs. Quidditch with padding.

“The things above you will be possible futures,” Teddy said. “Don’t mess with those, because that will definitely trigger a correction. What I’m more interested in is the past. The things beneath your feet.”

“I already changed things in the past,” I pointed out. “It didn’t go well.”

But Teddy shook his head. “You managed to alter specific events—that’s not the same as a wholesale shift in local time.”

“So you want me to somehow reach into the past and stop time?”

“Or speed it up. If you hit the right moment in history, for the proper length of time, you don’t just change a single event that ripples into the future—you change every event that happened on Earth at that given moment. Not just a ripple, but a wave.”

Or a tsunami, I thought. Wasn’t our team called that in another life?

“So . . . you’re saying that what I’ve been doing is like pumping gas, when I could actually be striking oil.”

“Bingo!” Teddy said.

“So how do I do it?”

His answer was simple. “By not being afraid to look down.”

Fallacy #4: Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

False. There’s no truth in that at all. What you see in the rearview mirror of your life is never what actually happened. You’re just inventing explanations that let you sleep at night. Hindsight, at best, is Coke-bottle glasses, with lenses that distort everything. It’s why they say eyewitness accounts at crime scenes are the least accurate kinds of evidence. What you firmly believe you saw is rarely what you actually saw. In that way, we’re all creating our own realities.