Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Yep,” she says. She ought to produce some witty banter, she knows, but the strain is too great. It’s been less than twenty-four hours, and every moment has been an effort. To pretend. Her throat tightens and she gulps air.

  Judith seems to get the message. She gets up, smacking the arms of the chair. “Back to the grindstone! Lunch later?”

  “Sure.”

  Judith turns on the way out. Says, “Lisa.”

  “Mmm?”

  “When you’re ready. You can just go ahead and tell me whatever it is. Okay?”

  She can only nod in response. When Judith is gone, she crosses her arms on the desk and lowers her head onto them.

  18.

  They eat at a campus café run by art students; Judith leads her there without asking where she wants to go. They must eat here every day. Judith talks about her latest conquest, a man who works in development and is “sort of married.” Elisa knows about him already, from the e-mails. She has been worrying all morning about this lunch but it’s easy—Judith will happily do all the talking, if she is allowed. Another good reason to like the woman.

  Back at the office she selectively writes to certain people, complaining of an imaginary computer crash and asking for updates on various projects and situations. She clicks all the links on her desktop, figures out how to use things. It isn’t difficult. Indeed, it’s like her other job, except with less direct responsibility, thus easier to fake. By four o’clock she is feeling more confident that she’ll be able to do exactly that. She has learned the names of the other women in the office—Linda, Tessa, Jane—and what they do. She has seen a few professors she recognizes, passing through on their way to the lab, and she says hello. It is good to have something dull and necessary to think of.

  Because her real preoccupation is not, shouldn’t be, this job. It’s Silas. That he is in this world, alive. She can’t shake the feeling that he has somehow engineered this: that he has brought her here, to show her something. To prove something. The internet has told her that he makes worlds. That’s how he puts it. “I make worlds.” At Infinite Games, he is known as a rebel. This is how he presents himself. She has found an interview with him, in an online trade publication, in which he flogs a new game he designed, called Mindcrime: Destiny’s Mirror, and criticizes his rivals. The gaming industry, he says, is made up of emotionally stunted engineers with no imagination. Only he, Silas Brown, is doing anything of lasting value.

  INTERVIEWER: But your projects don’t sell. At least they don’t sell compared to Berserker and the other big titles at Infinite.

  SB: Sales aren’t the point. Vision is the point. I’m trying to invent a new paradigm. Designers are stuck on the notion of story. As if it’s the story that makes a game worth playing. But nobody gives a fuck about story. Nobody cares what happened in some guy’s past, like if bandits raped his mom or kidnapped his sister or gunned down his buddies or whatever. That shit is stupid. It gets in the way. Games aren’t stories, they’re games. They have to invent themselves. Like life.

  INTERVIEWER: But isn’t life made up of stories?

  SB: No. Stories exist to make sense of life. But they’re a pointless exercise. Life is inherently nonsensical. Drawing strands of meaning together is for idiots. All there is, is right now, this moment. Noticing things and doing things. Making things happen. Building a tower of blocks, kicking them, making them scatter. Do it again and again, the pattern of blocks is different every time. You can’t replicate it. That’s what I want to evoke in a game. The first-person shooter, in its current conception, is moribund. Nobody gives a fuck about missions, about assuming some dumbass motivation some other guy thought up for you, like having to assassinate an arms trafficker or getting revenge on some guy or whatever. It’s a fake moral justification for what the gamer really wants, which is to make shit happen. To manipulate the controls and watch things die and be born. To make worlds with your hands.

  INTERVIEWER: But obviously people do want missions. Those games sell better than your games.

  SB: People don’t know what they want. I do.

  If there was any doubt in her mind that this world was real, that this Silas was real, that interview has put it to rest. Silas is alive. That’s him. She remembers a discussion she had with him one night, while he lay in his bed, a handheld video game on pause in his lap, an impatient expression on his face. He was thirteen. She was asking him, begging him really, to change his behavior at school. Because, when he got into trouble, it made trouble for his brother. Because the people who cared about him got upset. Because he had a future, and everything he did now had an effect on that future. Didn’t he understand? He did not live in a vacuum. Everything he did had an effect.

  By this time, Silas had begun to assume the imperious air that he would carry with him for the rest of his short life. He betrayed little emotion aside from stoic endurance. He looked at her and said, “That’s not my problem.”

  Weakly, with profound exasperation: “How can you say that?”

  And Silas said, “If I have an effect, then so do other people. So they can have their own effect to push against my effect. Can’t they?” And he looked at her with real curiosity, as though truly interested in the answer.

  “Some people can’t.”

  “Then that makes it their problem.”

  “But Silas—it’s not all about you. It’s about other people, too. Who are close to you. Don’t you want to help them with their problems?”

  He frowned, turning back to his game. “When have they ever helped me with mine?”

  As was often the case when she dealt with him, the rage came fast and hot, and she clenched both fists and pressed them into her thighs to suppress it. She said, “We try, and you don’t accept it.”

  Bleeping, digital music, the sounds of explosions. “Well then that makes it your problem.”

  Video game design. Why didn’t they think of that? They might have gotten him on that track early, won his respect by giving him the opportunity. Of course they never considered that such a thing existed. Games were distractions, unconnected to real life. They did not think of them as made things, as designed things. Another blind spot. They might have saved him.

  But here, in this world. Did they save him? What was different? What had been different? Was there a split, a single place where the universes diverged? Did they—did she—make a different choice here, a choice that kept him from climbing into that van? What small thing, what word or deed, would have been enough to change this?

  Or perhaps there was no single place where the worlds diverged. Maybe many things separated the two. Maybe it isn’t a matter of cause and effect, but of random variation. Brother universes, forever at odds.

  19.

  She is staring at the ceiling, thinking, when she hears her name being called, a pounding on the outer door. She jumps up, hurries into the hallway. Everyone else has gone home. It’s Derek.

  “I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes.”

  “I’m sorry! You should have called.”

  “I shouldn’t have to,” he says. He is following her back down the hall, to her office. He stands, peering around, while she gathers her things. She notices him looking at the empty space on the desk where the family photo should be.

  “You’re right.”

  “We’re going to be late,” he says.

  And without thinking, she replies, “For what?”

  He stares at her. “Our session.”

  “Oh God,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  She follows him out and pulls the doors shut behind her. On the stairs, after a moment’s thought, she says, “The conference—I thought today was Monday.”

  “It’s all right,” he says without turning around. It is obviously not all right.

  Derek drives ten minutes in silence until they reach the city limits, and then says, “It has not escaped my attention that you are only forgetting the most important things.”

  She sits with her hands fo
lded in her lap. She wishes she were back in her office.

  “The things,” he continues, “most germane to the survival of this marriage.”

  “I don’t—” she says and then stops.

  “It feels like sabotage. I am not saying that it is. I do not know your motivations. But it feels to me like you are trying to sabotage us. For some unseen purpose.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I don’t think I believe you.”

  Eventually they arrive at a renovated farmhouse on a lonely stretch of road between villages. The driveway leads to a barn in back that has been fitted with sliding glass doors and a discreet wooden sign that reads AMOS FINLEY, MFT. Derek slides open the door and steps in, and Elisa follows.

  They are in a bright carpeted room with wood paneling and an unmanned reception desk. From behind a green-painted door come plaintive voices. A clock reads 4:56. They are not late.

  After a moment the door opens and a young man and woman walk out, the woman leading, red-faced, the man trailing behind with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. They pass by Elisa and Derek without a glance. A small bearded man emerges now; he is thin and long-faced, about fifty, dressed in tan pants and a big floppy cotton sweater. Elisa has never seen him before. He says, “Derek, Lisa. Welcome.”

  They follow him through the door. The room is capacious, but comfortable. Wide windows look out onto a meadow. Rag rugs lie on a polished wide-plank floor. The man sits on a small sofa, tucking one shoeless foot under the opposite knee. Derek sits in an upholstered chair half-covered by a blanket, and Elisa takes a seat beside him, in a similar chair.

  “How are you this week?” the man asks them.

  Derek looks at her, and the man follows suit.

  “Fine,” she says.

  From Derek, a quiet exhalation.

  The man gazes at him, then at Elisa. He says, “Lisa?”

  “I forgot about our session today. I thought it was Monday.”

  “She was on a trip,” Derek offers. “Over the weekend. So she missed work yesterday.”

  The man waits, expectant. Derek doesn’t speak. Elisa is developing a headache.

  “Is one of you forgetting the second rule?”

  The man, the therapist, is almost smiling. He is filled with life—this conflict seems to delight him.

  “Elisa,” he says, “perhaps you’d like to remind us of the second rule.”

  At least, a question she knows the answer to. But she remains silent.

  “Derek?”

  “‘Blame yourself first, circumstance second, your partner last.’”

  The man turns back to Elisa. “Elisa, Derek seems to think there is a problem this week. Do you want to claim it?”

  The headache comes into focus just over and behind her left ear. She tips her head back. A crack seems to run diagonally across the skylight, then disappears. A twig, perhaps, blown by the wind.

  Elisa could panic, if she wanted to give herself over to it. She hoped to be heading home around now—at least there she has already had a few small successes. She has made coffee, she has found her favorite nightgown.

  But what is happening now seems impossible to navigate; it makes no sense. Of course they have been in therapy before, separately and apart. But that was about the boys. And it wasn’t with this man, this strange, almost jolly creature. She is inclined to think of him as sinister, the instrument of her impending downfall. But there is a part of her that likes him, liked him immediately upon seeing him. He feels to her like the closest thing to an ally she has in this room, maybe in this life, at least so far.

  She’ll take the path of least resistance. To the ceiling, she says, “I broke a rule. A different one.”

  “And which did you break?”

  “I… refused intimacy.”

  “You can refuse intimacy.”

  Elisa tips her head forward and looks at the therapist.

  “But,” he goes on, “you have to offer something in its place. Did you forget to do so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps Derek would like to suggest a substitute for intimacy?”

  Derek shakes his head. He is clearly annoyed by this avenue of discussion. “She is leaving things out.”

  Amos Finley has continued to gaze at Elisa. “You have the floor now, Lisa, do you want to explain?”

  She does. She wants to tell him everything. Instead she says, “Last night. I… panicked. I don’t know why. I thought something was wrong with me. That I was sick. So we went to the hospital. But it was nothing.”

  Derek is agitated. It’s clear that he would like to leap to his feet, pace in front of the judge’s bench, take her story apart. But he resists.

  The therapist stands up, smoothes his pants and sweater. He gazes over their heads, out the window. He sits down on the sofa again, this time with his legs crossed, Indian-style. He says, “Something has changed this week. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Lisa, you went to a conference?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did something happen there? Something that has caused your behavior to change?”

  “No.”

  Derek breaks in. “There has to be. You’re different.”

  This is true. She can’t speak. She reaches down and rummages in her bag for her aspirin, but for some insane reason there isn’t any there. When she looks up, the therapist is holding out two tablets for her. She takes them. “Water?” she asks, and he stares at her a moment before pointing to a second green door in the corner. It’s a small restroom with a sink and toilet. In the mirror above the sink, she looks red and disheveled. She swallows the aspirin and comes back into the room.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she says.

  The man laughs.

  Derek rubs his forehead. “Are you mocking me?”

  She has not sat down. She stands in the middle of the room and feels sweat blooming under her arms.

  “No!”

  “She said she had a stroke,” Derek says, gesticulating at the therapist. “She didn’t have a stroke! We went to the hospital, and we came back, and she made me tell the whole story of how we met. Of our entire marriage, the trouble with Silas, everything. She is forgetting, or pretending to forget, everything. She forgot the rules. She forgot about this appointment.”

  The therapist is not looking at Derek, but at her, gazing at her with a strange intensity, as though for the first time, as though she’s naked. She is still standing.

  “Lisa,” he says quietly. “Have you forgotten these things? Or are you trying to… make things difficult for Derek?”

  “I’m not trying to be difficult.”

  “Why did you call me Doctor?”

  “It was a reflex, I’m sorry.”

  Derek says, “She is doing everything differently. She sat at a different place at the table. She wore an old nightshirt.” He seems embarrassed at the last, as if suddenly aware of some deep pettiness once hidden from himself.

  “May I sit down?” Elisa says, then takes her place without waiting for permission.

  The exchange has changed the mood of the session. The fight has gone out of Derek. The therapist steers the conversation around to other things, he is talking more generally now, about trust in the marriage, restoring and maintaining trust. It sounds like a canned speech, some shtick from a book he wrote. Elisa ought to be paying attention, there is likely plenty to learn here, but her attention drifts to the window, to a cluster of whitetail deer browsing at the edge of the woods, and to the motion of the wildflowers and grasses in the breeze. The sky has clouded over, everything appears warm and lush. She longs powerfully for her real life.

  The session is ending. Derek and the therapist are standing up and so Elisa does too. The therapist asks Derek to go out to the car so that he can speak with her alone for a moment.

  Derek’s compliance is instantaneous and disconcerting. He turns and walks out the door and is gone. The room is very quiet now. The deer are gone from the meadow. There is a movement to her right
and when she turns the therapist is standing there, holding his eyeglasses in his hand.

  “Lisa,” he says.

  She remembers, just in time, not to say Doctor. But when she utters his name, quietly, it comes out wrong, blunted and slurred. Amos. They face each other, breathing in and out.

  “There’s nothing you need to tell me?”

  “No.”

  His eyes are large and tired and faintly wet. They blink. “But there is something you want to tell.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I think we should meet one on one.”

  She is heavily conscious of her body in the room and, though she is dressed, she wishes she had something—a bathrobe, a blanket—to cover herself with. There is an intimacy between them—between the therapist and his idea of her—that makes her feel disturbed and excited and envious. Because it’s her intimacy, the other Elisa’s. She pictures that woman in her own real body, trapped in it, in her thin body and vacant marriage, driving out here, pulling over at the side of the road, gazing at the therapist’s house and office with loneliness and longing.

  And like that, she has an epiphany. In her real life, she is lonely.

  “We’ve come a long way together,” says Amos Finley. “You know you can tell me anything. Don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you’re ready.”

  She is moved, suddenly. She sort of wants to hug him. He seems to notice and draws back, almost imperceptibly.

  “All right,” she says.

  He smiles, slides his glasses back onto his face. His eyes recede and focus and he holds his palm out, inches from her shoulder, and says, “Go to your husband.”

  PART TWO

  20.

  She tells Derek she’ll be going in to work early every day, in order to reorganize things. He agrees to drive her, though she wishes she could just drive herself—but never mind. This still buys her an extra hour and a half alone, at the office, studying… this job, ostensibly, but actually, this life.