The brilliant science fiction writer Roger Zelazny described the theme of traveling between parallel worlds in his Chronicles of Amber. In the book, it's slightly different, but generally, one of the descriptions suggests that we only think we live in the same world. In reality, we imperceptibly move between worlds. And in the new world, it seems to us that we meet the same people, but in reality, these are different copies of those same people whose past was different, slightly different, or even very different. This is exactly what, as we can see, happened in this case with Albert. (Or, perhaps, it was alcoholism).