“Or people, even. Sure. It’s—unpleasant.”
“Then, some addicts get the blindness around objects. Locations, commonly, can be triggering, too.”
“So, this place? Is it like that for you?”
“This room, no. The opposite. Initially, I was doing the interviews in my apartment, but I guess I got high a lot back in the day. When I was young. I thought, that could be good. It might set the stage, get me into the mind frame, link me as the documentarian to the experience. But that was a mistake. It’s also possible for something to be too rich in experience, in memory. Think of it like a point on a map, which you’ve routed through repeatedly, traveling again and again, always different routes, until eventually, that spot becomes illegible. A root place is like that, territory revisited and revisited until it starts to record as a blank.”
I sip my coffee. “My therapist says something like that, but for her it’s neurological. We keep tracking things into this blank trough.”
“Sure, that squares,” he says, “It fits, mostly. But certain phenomena, I think, point us to another explanation. If the blank is merely perceptual, what do we do with the intersections that happen there, the experience of linking with another? Why do others, sometimes, seem to share these precise memory gaps? Doesn’t it seem, sometimes, that blank places also belong to others?”
“Delusion? That’s the line I’m supposed to buy right now. Our brains are malfunctioning, and some like executive function or the superego or whatever, stitches it together into a kind of weird conspiracy. The links, the coincidences, they’re after the fact. So I’m told.”
The man reading Arabic folds his paper and stands, passing through a shaft of the afternoon sun, and then exits the room. I am alone with the man. Isaac, I think, Abraham.
“The founder of OneLife, you know, she was a user herself? She came to think of the cloud as a space of possibility. You get high, and there’s a kind of roulette. You enter the emptiness, ricochet out into some unpredictable point. Something is lost, something found. High, we’re passive recipients of the process. But what, the founder asked, if we could harness it? Control, even, what we gain in the process? Sacrifice willingly, what we are able—or even what we need—to lose.” Until now, his voice has remained conversational, casual, but an edge has begun to creep in.
“By getting high again?”
“No, no. Certainly not.”
“You said you were doing interviews in your apartment.”
“Sure. So, what I think the likely world gets right,” he says, “is that cloud is mapped into our lives. Certain places or objects or people are like the—what did you call them? Troughs of forgetting?”
I nod.
“This particular root place I’m interested in, it’s been a lot of things. Old bungalow colony—you know?”
“Catskills? Middle-class Jews having summer vacation?”
“And then it appears to have had a life as a holding place for recent refugees, as an informal resettlement camp before the Soviet Union began to open up immigration. After that, as I mentioned, it warehoused imported films, and probably cloud was smuggled in at the same time. For two summers in the eighties, it was home to a children’s summer camp. Cloud places are like that. Like a trough. Many lives route through these places. OneLife calls them inversion points. If we can penetrate into the blank space, sacred object, see the face, we have a brief period of opening where certain lost tracks may be accessible to us. The likely world, but in this one.”
“I think I follow. This place—Longwood—why I was asking how you chose it—has something of that quality for me.”
“That’s what was going on in the lobby? You seemed disoriented, briefly. I wondered.”
“Could be,” I say. “Possibly.”
Abraham places a small device on the table. I recognize it from outside of Uno’s. He pauses before he continues. “Listen. I almost never record the first interview. Even with the best subject, you have to establish rapport. People get awkward, start performing or clam up. But, do you mind?”
Subject. I try to decide if that’s sexy or creepy or creepy-sexy. “Yeah, OK.” The request weirdly flatters me, as if I’ve passed some test. I am aware of the distance between us under the table, which feels precise and deliberate. How he is, his care with his physical presence, seems somewhat to have the reverse effect from the one he intends. It makes me pay attention. I look at him, try to make out the details of his face. Bone structure. Brown eyes, but it’s not just that I can’t see him. There’s something that makes me hold back.
“Let us say that these inversion points function as attractants.”
“I was thinking about magnets, earlier. Polarity.”
“I like that,” he says. “I can fall into yours, perhaps. You can fall into mine. We go inside, we get muddled.” He pulls the lid off his coffee and drinks. “So, that’s what seemed to happen with this project. I was meeting with interviewees in my apartment, and then I had a break-in. There was this map, lakes and trees, a real rural place, which I’d annotated. It means a lot to me, represents maybe six months of work. But to a stranger, it shouldn’t be anything.”
“An annotated map,” I say. The phrase calls up an image, vivid and recent, but I can’t place it. The prickle of discomfort returns.
“Yeah. I’ve got gear in there. Computer, audio equipment. Even some decent art. But all the guy takes is this map, Sullivan County. To me, it’s childhood, long ago. Why would someone else care about it? It’s important to me, but is it also possible that my place belongs to others? Draws them? Do we share our inversion points? So you see why I moved the conversation to somewhere more neutral. My project is about root places, but I didn’t want to operate out of one.”
“But my—disorientation. When I got here? Maybe this place isn’t so bland after all.”
“Do you feel it up here? In this room, too?”
I shake my head. “I can’t say yet.”
He shifts the recorder slightly, perhaps the better to catch my words, perhaps just a tic. “I think of it like the internet,” he says. “Some weird video everyone gets obsessed with. Objectively, it’s not that funny or interesting, but all of sudden, all the searches are routing through this point. People are inexplicably riveted.”
The discomfort shifts toward vertigo, but I remind myself that this is how the brain incorporates repair, the feeling of significance—
“This place, this building,” he says. “Longwood. The thing you said about trash cans, as a kid. Does it have some kind of significance for you?”
“Oh, G-d. Can we skip this question?”
“Sure. Of course. Let’s get at it another way. Why did you come here today?”
“You’re right, you know. The tape recorder does make me self-conscious.”
He smiles. It’s a practiced smile, reassuring. “Here’s what I’ve seen. For a couple months, maybe. You’ve been dodging me. And today, for some reason, you’ve changed your mind.”
“Wait,” I say. “I thought you were just looking for folks who’d been through it. But it’s me in particular?”
“It’s fine. I get it,” he says. “But what I think, maybe something changed.”
“Is that a question?” I ask.
“What happened, Mellie? That’s my question. I think, since we last spoke, you entered a blank and it brought you here. To me. I would like to know about it.”
I shake my head. The coffee in the cup has gone cold, and I’ve barely had any of it. “I’ve been staying away from all that,” I tell him. “It’s part of getting clean. Route around, they say. Avoid falling into the same old trap.”
“At the higher levels,” he says, “and I get if you’re not ready—but as you progress, when you’re strong enough—you will have to go inside.”
“Inside? You used that word before, but I’m not sure I know what it means.”
“I’d like to tell you something, Mellie. It’s about you.”
“I’
d rather you didn’t.”
“This is a couple of months ago. Right after I started OneLife, this one day, I was low. Just kind of wandering around, trying to keep myself focused. I’d been sober for almost two years, but this was a day when I wasn’t sure of myself. There are things I have to live with that I sometimes don’t think I can. And they eat at me, acid, on the inside.”
“This is about me?”
“I know I did things, and that forgetting doesn’t absolve me. Times like that, the only thing that feels like it will is a mouthful of cloud. So it’s one of those days, I’m grinding through it. 2:05 p.m. 2:10 p.m. Every minute, it’s impossible—and then there you are. You’re walking beside Emily, pushing a stroller, but it’s you. It’s Mellie.”
“That was a bad day,” I say.
He shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m getting at. I hadn’t thought of you in years; maybe, to me, you no longer existed, and then there you were. At my next inversion session, I saw my place, the place on the map that got stolen. This place, that place. You, on the sidewalk. Geographically, they’re separate, but there are lines running through them in the cloud. It may not make sense yet, but whatever you’re looking for, why you came here today, I think it’s possible it links to my place.”
I know it’s a bad idea. Look, I do. But I reach into my wallet and pull out the OD TO scrap, unstick it from the photograph I’ve been storing it with, and slide the paper across the table. His eyes flicker, brighten. The photograph I keep beneath my palm.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m newer at this process than you are, but there’s another thing you should consider. We are sometimes wrong, when we attach significance. Sometimes, those attachments are misplaced.”
“What is this?” he asks, tapping the paper.
“It’s not related to your project. It’s not a root place. There was this guy—I thought he was someone, but I might have wrong. We got into it. He dropped this in my car. That’s what brought me here, why I agreed. I thought, on the strength of four letters, that it was all magically connected. He’d still be here, or there’d be some clue, something I would discover that would clarify things.”
His fingers, on the table, seem to be inching toward mine. What disconcerts me is that he seems unaware of it, that a part of his body is about to escape the perimeter he’s built around himself, that it’s me who’s making him do it.
“Exactly,” he says. “Precisely. Today, when you walked in here. You were disoriented. What was it? Things being drawn in. You, this man. The feeling like there are branches, things reaching out—”
“But not necessarily in the same direction,” I say. “Right?”
“I know. I admit that. It makes sense,” he says. “But the links feel so vivid to me. The lines between you, and me, and this place I saw. The water in front of me. I’m a kid—not a kid, but not an adult either. I tried to save this girl from drowning but—it was my fault—when it happened, I think you were there.”
I see the details are meant to draw me out, but they don’t call up anything in me. “Coincidence,” I say. “Correlation.”
“No,” he shakes his head. “Mellie. I’ve been back. Not long ago. I drive to the place on the map. No roads, but whatever, I circle the property. Nothing. I circle again; still nothing. So, I get out of the car. I’ve got a trek compass. I enter the coordinates, and start walking. It’s the same deal. I keep finding myself back at the road. I’m like a person looking at a gorilla. I can’t see the damn gorilla, even though it’s right in front of me.”
“You know,” I say. “I could have been exactly there, in the exact same place, but it might not help you at all. That’s maybe the point. Memories deceive even normal folks. For people like us, they’re the same as fiction. Stick to the facts.”
“Here’s a fact,” he says, and he is sliding something across the table to me. It’s some kind of ticket, faded, muddied over. “This is what I found. The only thing I could find.”
The object is a bus ticket, origin: Los Angeles. End point: Sullivan County, New York. The date is about two years prior, and the name of the person it has been issued to is now illegible, but it is a particularly long name, with an l in it, a z and a hyphen.
“I think that’s yours, Mellie. I think you’ve been to my place, too, to Kif-Vesely’e.”
I know this isn’t right. “Say that again.”
“Kif-Vesely’e,” he says. He considers my scrap of paper, then he hands me a key card. “And there’s this.” There’s a monogram, a curling design of a tower. OD TO. “That’s my apartment number. 2f.”
“No,” I say. “You’re not him.”
“Not who, Mellie?”
The sparks return, things at the edge, pushing in. Old residents. Judging by the deed. A map in a duffel bag. I push back.
“Kif-Vesely’e? Those were the words? And they were on the map?”
The man nods.
“How did he find you? Any idea?”
He shrugs. “There was monitor footage. I might have recognized him.”
“From where?”
He hesitates again. “We’re connected.” His fingers are still moving across the table. There’s a part of me that wants to follow him over whatever bridge we’ve reached, but I’ve been through that kind of hippie stuff before. My mother, with her past life regressions, and Nancy with her gurus and meditation.
“What did he look like?”
“Big,” says Abraham. “Gym type. Twitchy.”
I sit back, let it come to me. Kif-Vesely’e. You know how to find it. Former residents. “He was after something; someone who used to live here. He knows you? He wanted something from you? Tell me your name again. Your full name.”
He says his name, but it is as if it’s spoken in my high school French. There is a bursting of flame, a sense of melting. I reach into my wallet and pull out his card. It takes a minute for my vision to clear. I’m aware of actively fighting off a certain haze. Cohen Audio. Judah Cohen. “You’re Lew Cohen’s son.”
He shakes his head. “This isn’t about my father, Mellie. It’s not him. It’s not Mondays. We’ve run into each other again, and again. “
“You said you hadn’t seen me in years,” I say. “Is it because I worked for Lew? Is that how you know me?”
“Not only,” he says. “Not just.”
“And this place, on the map. You said your father was connected to it, too? Lew Cohen? You mentioned a video. You said, there was traffic to a video.”
“It was an analogy.”
“Tell me about the video.”
His eyes fix on my hands. “I don’t speak to my father. I haven’t seen him since I got clean.”
“But there is a video? One of his?”
“After the break in. When I returned. There was something on my monitor.”
“A woman walking back and forth?”
“Your name is linked to it. My father’s, too. This woman, Valerie Weston. That’s all I know.”
“Listen—” I know his name; I want to say it, but it won’t quite come out of my mouth. “Listen, guy. You know what I did for your father? I took these videos, and I hijacked them. Someone’s just trying to watch a little skin, and then they click on my program, and all of a sudden, their machine is doing our work. This particular video, it’s missing a part. This is what your thief was looking for, why he came to me. Kif-Vesely’e. It’s just another place on his list, a location to cross off. You want something. You want to fix something in your life. I understand that. But we’re not all going in the same direction. You, me, the thief, your father, we’re hijacking each other. You might end up where you want to go, but it’s not going to happen through me.”
I collect things off the table, my purse, the OD TO scrap, the bus ticket, but when I reach for the photograph, I realize he has it pinned under a finger. It wasn’t my hand he was reaching for, but this.
“I have this book,” I say. “I keep scraps. Not everything in it leads to something.”
“Kif-Vesely’e, my place, the name of the camp. It’s written here too.”
“Take it,” I say. “I have nothing to do with it.”
Now, he picks up the photograph. “It’s me,” he says. He tilts the warped photo paper, cocks his head. “Is that you? Are you with me there? Were we together?”
I can watch the cloud sickness fog over his features, even if I cannot quite make them out. He remains a blur to me—a blank place. But I am not the same for him. I’ve never had any impression that he has trouble seeing me.
“It’s someone else,” I say. “You confused me for someone else.”
“No. You come to me, too. That night, at the Fens. I was staying at that exact unit. With that old woman. The big guy was there with you. I was worried, and I—it was me who told Emily.”
His words click for me, then. The Fens. Emily said someone had seen me at my dealer’s house. I remember myself, pathetic and hungering. My baby in the running car and me so hungry for cloud I left her there with some strange man lurking just to score a one-off. And he knew Emily, and so he had been the person who told her I’d been visiting my old dealer. Am I supposed to owe him for that?
He’s just one more person trying to reach into the depths of my crappy life and make it into something he can use. That’s why I like Emily. And the women at Independence. And even my formerly fat counselor. I can’t give anything to them. They aren’t watching me through a one-way mirror. And so I can trust what they say. I had escaped, that night, but barely. And everything this man is offering is about drawing me back.
I don’t know what kind of threat he represents, but I see clearly that I am like him. A zealot, following my own mad trail, OD TO, a couple of slips of paper I think will give me a better life. How you end up, if you follow things like this: begging some stranger to know you. I see him, clearly for an instant, and he wears a mania I recognize, a willingness to trust people who might not mean him well.
The Likely World Page 21