Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  She has felt this before. The imminence of something enormous and terrible, bearing down. Not knowing. The last time, she was not ready. She should have been, of course; all the signs were there, she should have seen it coming. She might have turned and faced it, stood in its path and stared it down. Instead she let it crush her.

  Another big rig roars past. The car shakes. She grips the wheel with both hands and lowers her head to it. All the air seems to be leaving the car. She thinks of the last thing she saw before everything changed, the soda can at the side of the road, and she sees it imploding, some invisible force crumpling it, it folds and twists in on itself, a death rattle escapes it. The steering wheel presses its fake leather texture into her forehead and blood rushes to the spot, and it is the heat from the blood and from the friction of her skin against the plastic that keeps her steady as the moment passes, the car inhales, the air around her cools.

  Elisa sits very still, opening and closing her fingers on the wheel, breathing deeply. She feels a cloud pass over the sun, then disappear; her vision behind her closed eyes goes black and then red. After an interval she sits up.

  She could look through her bag right now. It would tell her things, no doubt. Maybe it would prepare her better for her arrival at home. She considers, then decides to check one thing only. She feels around in the bag for her wallet, which is as she remembers, and takes a look at her driver’s license. It isn’t the same: her photo is unfamiliar. But the address is the same. She closes the wallet, shoves it into the bag, and pushes the bag onto the floor.

  A minute later she’s back on the highway, again heading home. At least she knows where it is.

  6.

  There was a time, back in Madison, after the accident, when she thought she was going to get a job, and she decided that she ought to get a picture of the boys to hang in her office.

  This wasn’t like her. She wasn’t sentimental. But now she needed to be reminded of what she had lost and how she had failed. And the people she worked with, at this imaginary job, they would pity and coddle her, and she wanted to show them that she didn’t need their pity, that she could take it, having this reminder there in the office with her.

  As it happened, she couldn’t take it after all. And she wouldn’t work again until Reevesport. But she didn’t know that yet.

  Derek’s mother was staying with them—she had come out from North Carolina for the funeral and lingered to help out around the house. As though Elisa, incapacitated by grief, would no longer be able to clean up after herself. This, anyway, was how Elisa chose to see it, Lorraine as an interloper, in collusion with Derek against her. Even from the depths of her misery, she understood that this wasn’t the case, that Silas’s death had changed her, that order had collapsed in their small house on Gorham Street and Derek feared for their marriage and for their life together: but still, he shouldn’t have invited Lorraine to stay. They had lodged her in Derek’s study, and she emerged mornings and walked slowly from room to room, coffee mug in hand, alert for signs of disorderliness. She often sat on the sofa with her arm around Sam’s shoulders, as though protecting him. At times she gazed into Elisa’s eyes and shook her head sadly, demonstrating her sympathy.

  Elisa disliked Lorraine. She had always considered this dislike to be a reasonable response to Lorraine’s dislike of her, but Derek had long maintained that Lorraine liked her just fine, or as much as it was possible for her to like any lover of Derek’s. Derek’s father had died young, Lorraine never remarried, and their attachment seemed unhealthy to Elisa. Crypto-sexual. For Derek’s part, he shrugged and smiled when Elisa criticized his mother, as though the very thought of the woman charmed him. Of course this was exasperating, but on the other hand, what mother wouldn’t welcome this kind of devotion?

  Well: Elisa, for one. She had not been a cold mother, or an unaffectionate mother, but she had taken pains to keep a distance, a slight detachment. She had not allowed the boys to climb on her, to sit on her lap, to lie with her when she lounged reading on the sofa or on her bed. She stopped breastfeeding each after one year (Sam, of course, lost out to his brother, who had arrived so soon, so unexpectedly; she might have nursed them both, but somehow this had seemed a kind of taboo, or perhaps a visceral reaction to Silas’s fussiness at the breast). What she feared, she would one day realize, was the overwhelming power of love: that if she ever loved her boys with the same level of intensity, the same flavor of intensity, that had once defined her devotion to Derek, she might never again take pleasure in solitude, in the fact of herself, in her self-containment, the intricacies of her mind. She feared she might give herself over to them, to the boys and men, and exist for them alone.

  Lorraine blamed Elisa for Silas’s troubles. She was the type of person for whom someone always had to be to blame: there were no innocent mistakes, no accidents. And if Silas was troubled, and Derek infallible, then who else’s fault could it possibly be? To her credit, Lorraine never spoke her mind, not to Elisa anyway. But in her posture, her demeanor, the pitying way she looked at the boys, at her own boy: it was clear how she felt. And now that Silas was dead, now that the worst that could happen had happened, Elisa had begun to agree with her. It was her fault. It was. Cutting off the nursing. Pushing him away when she was trying to read. Failing to give the second helping of dessert. Letting him cry it out in the crib. Since the funeral Elisa had become obsessed with the past, with all the wrong turns their lives together had taken. If only she hadn’t shouted. If only she hadn’t smacked. Wandering through the house, in those days of Lorraine’s tenancy, she would slow, then stop, mouth hanging open, staring at a patch of wall, thinking. Seeing herself doing this, understanding how it must look to Lorraine. And Lorraine was pleased to have been right about Elisa; her every gesture seemed to communicate triumph.

  Elisa would have liked to discuss this phenomenon with Derek, but he didn’t believe it to be real. He believed that his mother meant well and harbored no ill will toward Elisa at all.

  In any event, and in spite of everything, she thought she would soon be going back to work, and she thought she would like to have a photo of the boys there. They rarely took photographs, they weren’t that kind of family. They owned a small digital camera that now had a year’s worth of pictures on it, on the memory card, that they had never transferred to a computer, or gotten printed. The camera was always lying around somewhere, in the basket of pencils in the kitchen drawer, or on the coffee table, or in somebody’s bag, and every now and then one of them would pick it up and gaze at the photos on the tiny screen.

  Elisa was looking for the camera. She couldn’t find it. Sam and Derek didn’t know where it was. She searched for twenty minutes before discovering it, at last, in Lorraine’s room. Later, when Lorraine came home—she had taken Sam and Derek to the movies—and saw the camera in Elisa’s hands, she said, “I see you found the camera.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Lorraine said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Derek was standing beside his mother, keys still in hand. They were in the kitchen, Derek staring at Elisa, who sat, still gripping the camera, at the table. Where she had been waiting for them. Sam had disappeared. Lorraine was looking at something on the floor, or perhaps just at the floor.

  “They’re gone,” Elisa said. “The pictures.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Derek said, “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking to your mother.”

  Now Lorraine looked up, her face scrubbed of emotion. “I don’t think so, dear. I was just looking at them.”

  “Not all of them,” Elisa said. “The pictures of Silas. I took one of the boys together. It’s not in here.”

  “Well, whatever is on there now, that’s what was on there when I picked it up.” She swept her hand over the countertop, as though wiping away dust, though there was no dust.

  Elisa looked at Derek, who was staring at her with curiosity. Elisa held out the camera to him
.

  He sat at the table and clicked through the photos with his thumb. He said, “I’m not sure anything’s missing.”

  “All the pictures of Silas.”

  “He hated having his picture taken.” His eyes were still on the screen. “I don’t think there were any.”

  “Derek,” she said. “You remember the one where they’re in the booth at that diner. And at the state park. And the one where he’s throwing rocks into the creek.”

  “Did he come to the state park with us? Didn’t he stay with what’s-his-name, that fat kid?”

  “He came to the park. You took his picture. I took his picture.”

  “Well,” he said, and handed the camera back. “Maybe something happened to them. Some digital thing.”

  This, of course, was asinine. Derek wasn’t an idiot. He was a lawyer, an academic. He was the most organized person she had ever met. (Later, it would be his uncharacteristic unconcern that would tell her their marriage was falling apart: his unwillingness to solve their problems, any problems, however insignificant.) He did not believe that “some digital thing” had happened—and even if he did, he would know which digital thing he was referring to. This was an act he was putting on for his mother. To signal his sympathy for her position, her reason for deleting the photos, whatever it might have been.

  “Things are always malfunctioning,” Lorraine said from across the room. Her back was turned, and she was making tea at the counter.

  Now Elisa stared at the floor. The room was silent. She wasn’t going to raise her head to look at him, not just yet. There would be an apology in his eyes. Indulge me. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  But so what? There was nothing here to satisfy anyone, even Lorraine. There were no points for anyone to score. Later that night she would feel this even more powerfully, as she imagined the conditions under which Lorraine would have deleted the photos: alone in the study, knowing her dead grandson was there, on the memory card, a poison pill. Maybe she was drinking. What did Elisa know? Lorraine picked up the camera in a fit of anger and grief, and deleted them. The seeds of misery, obliterated. It wasn’t about Elisa at all. It was what Lorraine’s body had done to quell the sadness she did not otherwise know how to express.

  The photos were still on there, of course. Elisa herself understood how it worked, the subterfuge of digital storage. The data wasn’t overwritten, it remained in place, there on the memory card. All that was removed was the camera’s willingness to acknowledge it. Where the camera once saw the photos, it now saw holes: neat blank spaces, like graves.

  Flawlessly implemented denial: this is what pressing the DELETE key accomplished, on the family camera. There were places in town where Elisa could take the card to have the data recovered, to have the photos exhumed. But, with much the same variety of inertia that would later prevent them from moving Silas’s real grave to Reevesport, she held back. Something had been done, and that was that. A part of Elisa had moved on. She did not want to go back. Indeed, she was grateful, in a way, to Lorraine for eliminating the temptation to look, to prolong her agony. Or she would be grateful, lying in bed that night, once she had more time to think it over.

  But not yet. Now, in the kitchen, Elisa gave in: she looked up at her husband. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching his mother with apparent love and concern, and never did turn to face his wife.

  7.

  The trouble with driving is that there is nothing for the body to do. The mind sees the body moving; the landscape is rushing by outside. It believes that the body must be occupied. But the body is motionless, and the mind does not accept the experience as real.

  Several hours of this state lay ahead of her: she should use them to prepare.

  But how can you prepare for the unknown? For the impossible? She wants to know what to do, how to behave, but there are no precedents in her life, or any other life she has heard of, to follow. She can only think of movies. A spy picture: the agent going undercover, pretending to be somebody else, ferreting out secrets. Of course there’s always a moment when the spy’s cover is blown and he blasts his way out of the alternate life. Or he gets the information he needs and his mission ends. He returns home. He resumes his real life.

  Elisa is, in fact, returning home right now. Home is the mission. This is real life.

  Or it’s science fiction. Someone was doing an experiment, and the fabric of space and time was torn. She is the unwitting victim of a top-secret military project, code-named Omega or Vanguard. Somewhere an angry man in a uniform is shouting, demanding to know what went wrong. In her quest to discover the truth, she’ll go all the way to the top. And meanwhile the president picks up a red phone and, jaw tight, says Get… me… that… woman.

  Or it’s a psychological thriller. The heroine has amnesia. That’s a real phenomenon, not just a movie trope; it happens to regular people. You forget who you are and what you’re doing, and your past disappears. The people you love, the house you live in, they’re familiar to you. But you’re lost in your own life.

  Of course, her past has not disappeared. With effort, she could tell you where she was during any week of her adult life. She remembers every moment that led up to this thing, this state of being, whatever it is. But maybe this past life she believes is hers, is part of the amnesia—a kind of dream she was having. This is her real life, the one where she was at the conference. And the other one, the one where she was skinny and wearing cutoffs and driving her old Honda, that one was imaginary.

  But she knows that isn’t true. Or rather, if it is, she has no intention of accepting it, so it might as well not be true.

  In spite of the air-conditioning, she’s hot, and feels fat. She wants her old body back, the one she woke up in this morning. It’s her father’s body, lean, stringy, a little stooped. It embarrassed her in high school and college, but even then it felt good to live in, like the sparse apartments she favored, the casual relationships with boys she preferred, until Derek. She was surprised and grateful that this body came back after her boys quit nursing—she looked just like them.

  Now she feels like her mother, with boobs and a gut. Small boobs, small gut, but still. She’s reached some critical mass—hot enough on the inside to sweat, and the cold air chilling her. Fuck it! She turns off the AC and lowers the driver’s side window. The pressure inside the car changes and her ears pop. She has to open the passenger window too, to even it out. The car isn’t built to be driven with the windows open. It’s supposed to seal its driver off from the world.

  She doesn’t want to be sealed off. She would never buy a car like this, not in a million years.

  In the rearview mirror her eyes are different, softer somehow, the cheeks puffier, but the face tired. Has this body been up late, worrying? Drinking? Working? Having sex? Or did it lie in bed and watch TV, just like she remembers her real body doing?

  Driving, she is surprised at how calm she feels. Her hands on the wheel are still and her right foot maintains a constant speed. A moment of unease when a police siren sounds and flashing lights appear, but the cruiser is moving fast and passes before she even has a chance to react. Still, for the next ten minutes her neck and shoulders are tight and she keeps glancing in the rearview, alert for another. A part of her, ridiculously, always believes that she’s the one the cops are after; she is forever in a state of readiness for them to arrive on the scene, point, seize and detain her.

  Eight years ago, when the police phoned to give her the news, she could feel some primitive device taking control, creaking and groaning in her mind. There was no breakdown, no fit of grief. She just bore the extra weight. She thought she was doing this for Sam and Derek, but Derek spent all of his time smoking in the kitchen or finding reasons to go to campus, and Sam stayed in his room, and Elisa didn’t care to see either one of them. Probably they didn’t want to see her, either, or each other. Along with everything else they were feeling, they also felt relief, guilt. Guilt at the relief.

/>   They worried about Sam, especially when he retreated to his room or disappeared for hours on long walks by himself. A therapist prescribed drugs he declined to take. Only after weeks had passed did Elisa realize that he had what he wanted now, he had privacy, solitude. He could live for hours, days, without anyone judging him. His life was simpler and quieter without Silas in it. He put on muscle weight and his skin took on a healthier color. He spoke less, and rarely in complaint. He wasn’t depressed—he was learning how to be Sam. And Derek changed as well. He became more serious, more dedicated to his habits, if that is even possible. The world returned to him.

  But Elisa wasn’t sure, still isn’t sure, if she ever got the world back. There have been times, over the past ten years, when she has wondered whether some essential part of herself was missing. She seemed to have lost her capacity for delight—what happened to that version of her that was moved by everything? Whose emotions were so overwhelming, debilitating?

  There was a morning not so long ago when she woke up in the middle of the night, sat up in bed, and with absolute certainty knew that she was dead. She actually laughed at the force of this epiphany: it was summertime, the window was open, the sounds of insects and traffic carried through the room on the wind, and she understood that she could rise up out of the bed and fly out that window and disappear into the clouds. And then what? Dissolve into nothing: first her physical form, and then her mind, and then her… soul? This isn’t a thing she believes in, the soul, but she believed in it that night. Oblivion! It was hers if she wanted it; there was no need to haunt this house, this marriage. She tried to remember how she died; all she knew was that she fell from a great height and never hit the ground. She was still falling.

  Derek shifted, groaned, pulled his arms out from under his pillow. “You’re dreaming, go back to sleep.” His voice had the strange quality it had when he talked in his sleep: the crisp consonants, the slurred vowels. “Oh sure,” she said, and she lay down and closed her eyes. Two adults, half-married, half-awake, talking to one another from their respective dreams.