Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  The company is called Infinite Games; they make violent first-person fantasies for game consoles. Titles like Berserker 4 and Ultimate Warlock. She searches a little more. They’re popular, these games, but not all that popular. Popular enough, though, so that Silas appears to be quite successful. He is quoted in magazines and on gaming websites. There are a lot of pictures of him, almost always in direct sun. He wears his hair slicked back, gelled, and his arms are crossed. It’s tempting to think that this is how she imagined he would be, if he’d lived, but the truth is she’d never imagined such a thing, never allowed herself that indulgence. Here, he looks like a third brother, another person entirely.

  California, that’s where he is. She feels both relief and longing. He isn’t near. And it would seem that he is not in frequent touch.

  But he’s alive. Something has kept him alive, has given him a viable life. Something that was lacking in the other world. The real world.

  Because that’s what this is, isn’t it? Unreal? Or, an alternate to the real? She has been put here for a reason, surely. To do something. To find out what she did wrong in her real life, to find out how she could have saved her son. This is a dream she’ll wake up from, once she learns what she is supposed to learn.

  But even as she thinks this, Elisa has her doubts. Because she doesn’t believe in God. And what else could have put her here?

  15.

  A few hours later, she is standing in the driveway, ready for work. Derek will drive her there in his pickup—that seems to be their routine. The notion of Derek driving her anywhere seems absurd. The other car is obviously hers, she could drive herself. But this must be something they decided to do. For their marriage?

  Everything so far today has been excruciating. She wanted to make coffee—but does she make coffee? Or does Derek make coffee? Their coffee machine was the same, but the can of ground coffee was not in its familiar cave in the freezer, enfolded in frozen years-old hamburger rolls. Instead there were whole beans, and a grinder. How many to put in? How fine to grind them? She made choices, proceeded. The grinder was startlingly loud. Would it wake Derek up? It didn’t; he didn’t get out of bed, anyway. The coffee brewed. There was half-and-half in the refrigerator—hers? It didn’t matter, she drank it black. She was hungry, ravenously hungry—this body of hers was hungry. She wanted to make the oatmeal she liked to eat in her real life, but there was none in the cupboard. She stood for five minutes in the middle of the kitchen, wondering what in hell this woman ate for breakfast. In the end she settled on a banana.

  She didn’t know what to do after that, so she took another shower. When she reached the bedroom, Derek had woken up and gone downstairs. The clothes in the closet repelled her, but she put some on. Another skirt and blouse. In the mirror, she looked like a moderately attractive office worker.

  Probably she ought to put on makeup, but she didn’t.

  Derek smiled at her in the kitchen but said nothing. They read the paper. She drank more coffee. She looked at the clock. She said, “I’d better get to work.”

  He appeared surprised. “Why so early?”

  “There’s some stuff from the conference I want to get in order.”

  Derek frowned. “I can go in early.” He folded the paper.

  “You’ll drive me?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Now he comes out the door, locks it behind him. They get into the pickup. He pulls out and they head toward campus.

  He says, “No makeup.”

  She can only beg, with a look, for his patience.

  “You look pretty.”

  “Thank you.”

  She puts her hand on his thigh, just for a moment, then removes it.

  When he stops the car, she opens the door, takes up her bag and binder. She kisses him—this seems expected.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “About yesterday.”

  He nods, gently unsmiling.

  “We’ll have to… we’ll…”

  But his face tells her he’s had enough. She shuts the door and he drives away.

  She recognizes the building. It’s gray cement with an angled roof and small square windows that don’t open. She has come here from time to time, as part of her real job, to meet with researchers or deliver results for outsourced work. The entrance is on the other side, on the science quad, so she walks there. She passes a few graduate students, a man she thinks she recognizes, but nobody says hello. It’s already hot and the wind blows her hair into her eyes. She wonders how she usually does her hair—probably not this way.

  A directory inside the entrance tells her that administration is on the second floor. She takes the stairs. A moment later, here she is, in the hall outside the main office. Its double doors are propped open. Beyond them a receptionist or administrative assistant sits behind a desk, typing on a computer beside a nameplate reading BECCA SELGIN.

  It’s unclear what to do next. Is her office in there, part of a complex? Or is it out here, off the hallway, alongside what appear to be professors’ offices and seminar rooms? She walks to the end of the hallway and back, then to the other end, looking for her name. She doesn’t see it. There is nothing to do but go in.

  The woman called Becca looks up. She is in her twenties, pale, overweight. A dish of candies sits beside the nameplate. She smiles at Elisa but not without some restraint, some reluctance. “Morning! You’re in early.”

  Elisa holds up the binder. “Lots to read.”

  “Oh yeah, how was it?”

  “Very informative.” This is going well, she thinks. Then she says, “Any mail for me?”

  The girl appears a bit flustered, as if this is not something she is often asked. “Uh… maybe? Check your box?” Her eyes dart to the left, as though that’s where the mailboxes are.

  “Thanks, Becca,” and she walks left.

  There is a small room off the main one, accessible from the hall, with wooden pigeonholes on either side, and after a moment Elisa finds her name. There is no mail. But she can see now that the administrative offices lie along two short hallways, one on this side of Becca’s station, one on the other. She leaves the mailroom and walks down the hallway on this side, looking for her name on a door. The doors are all closed. She’s glad she came in early.

  “Are you looking for Judith?” It’s Becca’s voice.

  Sweat is breaking out under her arms. Is she looking for Judith? She supposes that’s what a person who would be walking this way should be doing. So, after an excruciating pause, she says, “Yes.”

  “She’ll be late. She’s got a doctor appointment. Oh geez, maybe people aren’t supposed to know.”

  “It’s all right.”

  This, then, means that her own office is not in this hallway. Correct? Because if you’re going down the hall toward your own office, nobody asks you if you are looking for Judith. So she draws a silent breath, turns on her heel, and crosses in front of Becca with what she hopes comes off as a purposeful stride. She is wearing the pumps she wore to the conference. They’re the only shoes in her closet that she is sure have been associated with work. Becca says, “You look different.”

  Elisa doesn’t stop, it’s a conversation she is not prepared to have. Over her shoulder: “Oh?”

  “Oh God, I didn’t mean bad. I’ll just shut up.”

  She’s down the hallway, peering at nameplates. “Don’t worry!”

  And here, finally, is her office. A note card, hand-printed with her name, is taped to the wall beside the door. The door is locked. She takes out her keys, finds one she’s never seen before, shoves it home. The door opens. She pushes inside, closes it behind her.

  16.

  She stands with her back against the door, breathing shallowly. Her relief is profound.

  The room is perhaps twelve feet square. Several plants, a coat rack, a desk. On the desk is a phone, a printer, a computer. There is a file cabinet, several chairs, bookcases covered with papers and binders. The shades are drawn, as if against aftern
oon light.

  She crosses the room and opens them. Now she sees a photo, on the desk, of Derek and the boys, the same one that shocked her in the hallway last night. She opens a drawer and puts the photo in it.

  Hours might pass before anyone knocks. This is what she hopes. She boots up the computer.

  The computer desktop is uncluttered, the background image generic. It’s like her machine at the lab, which in this life, she supposes, is someone else’s lab. There are links to various web pages, which she double-clicks. They lead to university sites, administrative resources, that require a password.

  She tries the password she used at the lab, a random series of numbers and letters. It doesn’t work.

  Though there is nothing in the world she wants less to do than open the door and go to Becca’s desk, that’s what she does.

  “Hey!” says Becca. She’s eating a granola bar.

  “I am totally discombobulated today,” Elisa tells her.

  “Tell me about it!”

  “And I am spacing on my password.”

  This gets her a pair of raised, excessively plucked, eyebrows.

  “Seriously?”

  “I know, right? Do you have a list somewhere?”

  Becca shakes her head; her voice takes on a more businesslike tone, as if some line has been crossed. “You gotta go to the SRIT web page and enter your e-mail, and it’ll ask you the secret question, you know, and then you can change the password. I’ll send you the link.” She turns to her computer and starts typing. “They tell you not to, but I write mine down. It’s on a sticky under the desk.”

  Elisa goes back to her office. No sticky under the desk. On the computer, there’s an icon for an e-mail program, and she opens it. And there’s her day’s work, laid out before her: thousands of e-mails, doubtless stretching back months, years, that will tell her what she said and whom she said it to, and presumably what on earth it is she is supposed to do here all day. The sight of this list, and the nested series of folders where the e-mail of the past has been archived, paralyzes her. She feels the way she did when, as a little girl, she pressed her nose to the glass of the TV screen to see what static really was: a mesmerizing and random and utterly boring thing that nevertheless compelled and frightened her. Then, as now, she felt fascinated and doomed. She opens the e-mail Becca has sent, and clicks the link. Enters into the browser window the e-mail address she has just learned. Hits “FORGET PASSWORD?”

  The security question is “RULE 2.”

  This was all about the third rule, Derek said.

  Shit, fuck, damn. What the hell are these rules?

  Elisa is certain that, should all else fail, she could walk over to the IT office and act like a dumb bitch and make them hand over the password. It’s a nice morning and already she is longing for a bit of fresh air. But she wants this finished now. She wants to crack this thing without getting up off her chair. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands and groans. Okay. Okay.

  She picks up the phone and calls Derek’s office, and he answers. He says, “Is everything all right?”

  “Can you answer a question for me?”

  “Sure,” he says, after a moment.

  “What’s rule 2?”

  The silence that follows is long.

  Elisa says, “I just… I don’t remember the order. And I forgot my password, and rule 2 is the security question.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Another silence. She can hear people talking in the background, perhaps in an adjacent office, and a truck rumbling by outside his window. He says, “Lisa, you understand that I am just… this is just completely baffling to me. I am just… going along with it now. Because I don’t know what else to do.”

  “I’m sorry, Derek, I…”

  “I know you’re sorry, I can tell, but that’s not the point. The point is…” There is the creak of his chair, an antique wooden office chair that his mother bought him when he accepted this job. “The point is you’re something else too, not just sorry, and I don’t know what it is.”

  She whispers, “Neither do I.”

  “That’s not a comfort to me. Or an explanation.”

  Perhaps it’s best to say nothing. She says nothing.

  Derek says, his voice deepened by resignation, “Rule 2 is ‘Blame yourself first.’”

  She remembers Derek on the stairs, the way he closed his eyes, his anger giving way.

  “Oh God, of course.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Thank you, Derek.”

  Again, silence.

  “Nothing yesterday,” she says, “was your fault. But I can’t explain now.”

  “I know it’s not my fault.”

  “I’m not having an affair. There isn’t anyone else. It’s nothing that happened or anything you did, it’s just me. Do you believe me?”

  He laughs. “Yes. Sure. We’ll just… sure.”

  “We’ll just what?”

  His breath catches; the chair creaks.

  “We’ll carry on… we’ll just carry on.”

  17.

  By nine thirty she has more or less worked out what she does for a living. Processes applications, deals with graduate student complaints, updates databases. Reminds professors how to do things: computer things. She has been reading the old e-mails, many hundreds of them, and in a spiral notebook she found in the desk has begun to take notes on each person she seems to have regular contact with. Her fellow office staffers; professors, students, the assistant dean. Every e-mail offers a few more small details, and each detail serves to confuse the overall picture of her job. She can see the parts but doesn’t know how they fit together. The job is both wildly intricate and completely boring.

  By ten she is wondering if she should take a leave of absence. But after that, then what? The sooner she learns the better.

  People have been moving around in the hallway for half an hour now. Female voices. She has never much liked other women. Derek had wanted daughters both times, but she was glad to have boys. Even when things got bad with Silas, when Derek reiterated his wish that they’d had girls (and in a tone that suggested it might be her fault, that her contrary desire had somehow expressed itself through her womb), she remained glad. If Silas had been a girl, it might have been worse.

  She has known for an hour now that only women work in this office. And that every last faculty member is male. There are two female graduate students, both with foreign names—she wonders if she knows them, if she likes them. Probably not. Probably she likes the professors. She likes scientists. She is one.

  And it occurs to her to wonder if the other her, the real one, has continued to live her life, her real life. She feels a moment of panic. She is living my life! Or perhaps they’ve changed places, that Elisa and this one, and the poor soft housewife, the woman bound to her husband by rules, is now panicking in that bony body.

  Ruining it—ruining her body with excess. And grief. Because that Elisa has just discovered that her son is dead.

  Her jaw tenses and her heels drum the linoleum floor. Then there’s a knock on the door and a woman’s head pokes in and says, “How was it?”

  Judith. This must be Judith. She is page one of the spiral notebook—the single most e-mailed person in the sent box. And Elisa recognizes her. Late thirties, bespectacled, curvy and loud, this woman has hovered around the edges of her real, her remembered, professional and personal lives for years. People at the lab know her. She’s at the coffee shop or the supermarket, talking on her phone. Men Elisa knows like this woman, want to sleep with her. Larry knows her—she gets dumb art framed, pastel-colored prints of chickens and barns, old magazine covers. His gentle mockery of her that tells Elisa that he wants to sleep with her, too.

  Of course Elisa dislikes her. Judith is one of those people you don’t know but know you’d hate. Which for Elisa is most people. But now, here, they are friends—the best of friends, to judge from the e-mails. She has read at
least thirty e-mails she herself has written to Judith, all of them in a tone—one of sly, wisecracking cheerfulness—that seems utterly alien to her own sensibility. Somehow this woman has awakened some undignified part of herself: gossipy. Sassy.

  “Boring,” Elisa says, and tries rolling her eyes.

  Judith slips in, shuts the door behind her, flops down into the only other chair in the room. “Any hot guys?”

  “Maybe a few.”

  “And didya fuck ’em?”

  “Ah… not all at once.”

  Is this working? Elisa feels close to hyperventilating. She has the fingers of one hand looped through a drawer handle on her desk, and she is hanging on for dear life. Judith gives her a slow smile. “Does Derek miss it when you’re gone?”

  What does this mean? Sex? “Oh, God,” she says, “I barely have time to put my bags down.”

  Judith laughs. She appears relaxed, as though this has been a normal exchange. Her hair is short and dark and frames a pretty but undistinctive face. What is it that men like? What is it that she is supposed to like?

  But then Elisa gets an inkling of what this is—what it’s like having a friend. This is something women, some women, need. This woman must know her secrets. This woman was her friend when whatever happened with Derek happened. Maybe she knows about the rules. Maybe she can tell her something about Silas.

  Only an instant has passed, in which Elisa considers telling her everything. Listen to me, hear me out. Between friends. I’m not crazy. I’m someone else.

  But when Judith says “What?” she changes her mind.

  “What ‘What’?”

  “You got a look.”

  “Passing thought. I’m tired. I have a lot to do.”

  Sage nodding. “We must change our wasteful ways.”

  She is referring to the university-wide budget crisis. This is why she was sent to the conference, Elisa has discovered. She has been asked to cut corners. This means staff—consolidating jobs, firing people. It might have to be Becca—Becca would go, and someone from the back office would do her job at the front counter from now on. Callers would get a voicemail menu. In the long run, it won’t make much difference. But nobody wants to give up her private office and sit out in front.