Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  She has found several very old e-mails to Sam in her sentbox, overly cheerful exhortations to take care of himself and not drink excessively and not be hurt by the things his brother says and does. The tone embarrasses her—it’s artificial, desperate. These chipper notes stopped more than a year ago, and don’t appear ever to have been answered. He is living in Santa Monica, apparently the same place Silas lives. Why?

  She needs to call him.

  It is Wednesday morning. She is sitting in her office. Her inbox is filled with responses to her queries: people have sent her project updates and status reports, as she requested. She reads them, and begins work on a slate of recommendations for the reorganization of the office. It isn’t hard. They won’t have to fire Becca. She will have Judith read it at the end of the week.

  Elisa is disturbed, a little bit, at the ease with which she is occupying this position, one she had no inkling even existed just two days ago. Does this say something about her? Are her talents so generic as to be adaptable to any job? Or is this job so generic that anyone could do it?

  More vexing still is the way the job foregrounds, in her mind, the reasons she left science in the first place. She was convinced, remains convinced, that if the world of biology had consisted solely of herself, a lab, and an unlimited budget, she would still be doing it. Indeed, she would be very, very good at it. As an undergraduate, she had been part of a genomics project right on the forefront of the field; she was the only undergraduate on the team, and the only woman. At first she thought she’d arrived—that to have crossed those lines was to have been accepted.

  But of course it didn’t work that way. To the other students, even to her professor, her inclusion gave them license to let their guard down, to indulge their pettiest selves. She was mocked the day she wore a skirt, then mocked the rest of the time for wearing jeans. She was told, many times, that her safety goggles flattered her, or didn’t flatter her. A tittering tour group, passing through the building, was presented with “the girl scientist.” Then she made the mistake of dating a grad student for a couple of months, a man of lesser intelligence to whom she was supposed to defer; and when they broke up, his friends on the team ignored her questions, sabotaged her work, talked about her in stage whispers when she was in the room. “Hey!” she called out one night in the crowded lab, “Will somebody please look at me and answer my fucking question?” It was her ex who answered, to the amusement of his friends, “I thought you didn’t like people looking at you. We’re just trying not to be sexist.”

  Her professor, who before had treated her with a certain amount of respect, now came on to her. “You look pretty today,” he said, and when she replied “Please don’t talk to me that way” a heavy curtain came down between them and he never asked her to do anything again.

  The project was tainted. She tried to get on another, to no avail. People told her she was crazy to want to quit. Her adviser, the only woman in the department, told her this. “That project is going somewhere,” she said. To Elisa’s complaints of sexism, of bullying, of disrespect, the woman turned steely. “I’d like to send you back in time twenty years and see how you like it.”

  She hated the bureaucracy. She hated the corporate money, the suggestion that certain outcomes were acceptable to the administration and certain outcomes weren’t. She hated the fact that all the people working in the department office were women and all but one of the professors were men.

  Now, here, she has become one of the women in the all-woman office, in a department where all the professors are men. They are decent people, the professors who are here this summer, but she is not real to them: they don’t acknowledge her as anything more than an office worker. Even at her lab job, in the real life, even when she is doing the same kind of organizational work she does here, she is regarded as a person who does science. But this job seems to have been perfectly okay with the Elisa Brown who accepted it.

  Then again, why should anyone treat her differently? And maybe part of being a good scientist is knowing how to parry insults, how to navigate bureaucracies. How to seize authority and respect, rather than waiting for them to be conferred. Indeed, maybe these are the defining traits of a good scientist—maybe the things that made her think she was a good scientist thwarted, were actually clues that she was not a good scientist at all. And maybe this Elisa has, for better or worse, accepted that.

  She considers, briefly, that perhaps the same could be said about being good at marriage. Or parenthood.

  It makes sense, she supposes, that in this world where Silas is alive, she isn’t in touch with him. But Sam? It’s hard to imagine the offense that would drive him away—that would compel him to move to California, to live near his brother, and never answer her e-mails. Maybe they write letters—there could be letters somewhere, tucked into a drawer or cubbyhole somewhere at the house. She’ll look later, when she gets home, but somehow she doubts it.

  When things were at their worst—with Silas, and with Derek, too—she could always talk to Sam. Even when he was small, when he could barely speak, he was interesting to talk to—habitually quiet, he became voluble when they were alone, asking questions, remarking on the scenery, trying to figure things out. He would be the scientist, she thought. He wanted to know how things worked. He had ideas about how they might—compelling ones. By the time he was five or six his questions fell outside her ability to answer, what-ifs about the nature of time, existence, the limits of the universe. He did excel at science in school, for a while, but his grades suffered as Silas intruded more and more upon their lives, and they never really recovered, even after the accident. By then Sam had come to think of himself as an indifferent student, and so he was.

  But he was still smart. She would like to tell him what had happened to her, to ask his opinion. He would certainly have one. He’d dismiss immediately the notion that she had lost her mind, go right for the science. “Where did Han Solo go?” she asked him once when he was six, having watched him, in play, tuck his action figure behind a sofa pillow. “Sucked into a hole in the space-time continuum!” was his reply.

  Twenty minutes seem to have passed, here in her office. The document file open in front of her makes no sense. She closes the word processor, opens a web browser, and clicks in the search box.

  She is thinking of Sam when she types the words “parallel worlds,” then adds “physics” and “study” and “university.” This is the kind of thing they talk about these days, in her real life, summer nights out on the porch when he has come over for dinner and Derek has gone to bed, Sam smoking with his chair tipped back and his feet up on the railing. Sam would take the idea seriously, at least for an hour. But what the internet gives her is a lot of science fiction. Television shows and novels. There are scientists who have theorized the existence of parallel universes, but nobody who is actually trying to figure out what is in them. This is the purview of cranks, dreamers, and Hollywood screenwriters.

  She wants to look harder, to find somebody who is actually looking into this idea, who thinks of it as palpably real. Instead she finds herself googling Silas again, digging more deeply into the search results. There is a reference to “Silas Brown of Infinite Games, minefield on gamedev.org.” She searches for minefield, gamedev, and ends up on an internet forum for hardcore gamers, video game testers, and game developers. And there is indeed a member named minefield.

  Minefield appears to be belligerent, impulsive. He has been banned multiple times. In the hierarchy of the game development world, he appears to be among the most successful professionals who still post on internet forums. There are celebrities in this world, and he is not among them, but he has some small fame here, in this community of hobbyists, wannabes, and up-and-coming professionals.

  He is clearly among the most knowledgeable members of the forum, and Elisa can tell, after half an hour of reading the threads he visits, that questions are often asked with the sole purpose of luring him into the open. At times he is very generous wi
th what must be basic advice. He answers a question about coding convex rotating polygons. He advises somebody on creating realistic intelligent motion in virtual crowds. (None of this makes any sense to Elisa; it’s like a map of a foreign country. She has never played video games, beyond Pac-Man once or twice, at the pizza shop, with a boyfriend, in 1984.)

  But every now and then minefield will respond to a question with withering personal criticism. You’re fucking pathetic. You come here expecting something for nothing. That is the stupidest fucking question I’ve read on here in six months. He tells people they’ll never amount to anything. He mocks their ideas, their spelling mistakes, their screen names, their graphic avatars. His victims fight back, weakly, trying to justify themselves. The forum breaks into camps, attacking or defending minefield. Members say they’ve had enough, threaten to quit the board. Moderators are summoned and issue warnings. Minefield mocks the moderators. The thread is locked. Minefield is banned. Minefield comes back, feigning contrition, and it all begins again.

  It has to be Silas. He is everything she remembers. He is as charming as he is vitriolic; you feel proud when he accepts you, and when he turns on you, you blame yourself.

  Elisa remembers something now, something from the months leading up to the crash. Silas brought a girl home after school one day. She might not ever have known it had the girl not sneaked out of his room to use the bathroom: Elisa saw her at the end of the hallway, darting across from one door to the other. They must have come in while she was out, or entered quietly through the back. Whatever the case, they were here, together: Silas and a girl, in the house.

  She heard the girl return to Silas’s room. She waited a few minutes, then sneaked down the hall.

  They were very quiet. Elisa could hear them kissing, hear them shifting on the bed. Then the girl said, “I really need to do this, Silas.”

  “Shh.” Silas groaned quietly, then spoke to her in a tone she hadn’t heard before: commanding, certainly, perhaps condescending, but gentle. He said, in a near-whisper, “All right, let’s see it.”

  The bedsprings creaked; Elisa heard a zipper. Not her clothes, her backpack. Then a grunt of effort as something was hauled out of it. The pages of a book, being turned. “What don’t you get?” was Silas’s question, weary, skeptical.

  “The whole thing,” she said.

  “Dude,” he said, “this is easy.”

  “Dude,” the girl said, not without sarcasm, “for you. Not for me.”

  Their conversation continued, with Silas dominating, talking about straight and curved lines, the slope of a line. F of X, F-prime of X.

  Derivatives. He was explaining calculus to her—helping her with homework.

  Elisa withdrew. She had never seen or heard him with a girl. He never brought one to the house. This one must have insisted. She withdrew to the kitchen, where she could still hear the doors open and close, and idled until the girl seemed to be leaving. Then she headed down the back stairs and busied herself in the storeroom, pretending to look for a particular can of paint, so that she could catch a glimpse as the girl headed out the back.

  It worked. She was alone, a small thing with a giant backpack. She started when she saw Elisa there, gasped.

  “Oops, sorry,” Elisa said.

  “Yeah, sorry, hi,” the girl said, hiding her face behind her hair and scuttling away, through the door, across the patio, and into a gap in the hedge. Elisa was surprised again—she wasn’t pretty. Plain, in fact, the face flat and broad, lank hair, thick glasses. She was done up like a punk, with pierced nose and lip and a black leather jacket. Her jeans were tight on her heavy hips; her exposed hairy ankles must have been cold, as it was a dry clear winter afternoon, near dark.

  Were they having sex? Something she would wonder, later, after he was dead: had he ever slept with a girl, or with girls; this one or others? She wouldn’t find condoms or any other evidence among his possessions, afterward; but then again she would never look very hard. Some of his things are still there, in boxes, in the other life. They might contain anything at all, or nothing.

  A week later Elisa was at the supermarket and saw the girl there, buying a can of Coke and a chocolate bar. She was with a friend, a skinny blond-haired thing in a ratty knitted hat. “Oh, hey,” the girl said, hiding her face behind a curtain of hair, and Elisa said, “How are you?”

  “I’m good,” Silas’s girl said. She appeared eager to leave; Elisa was on her way in, these two on their way out.

  And then Elisa said, quietly, conspiratorially, “I hope he’s treating you well,” and the girl’s face froze, and her friend’s mouth made an O of delighted shocked surprise.

  “Uh huh” was the reply, and they were gone. Elisa imagined them gasping and cackling in the parking lot, and felt as embarrassed as she had ever felt in her life. She was worse than her mother, worse than Derek’s even. She had visited humiliation upon this poor child, and brought it down on herself as well. But she had wanted to warn the girl. Silas was trouble, after all.

  After he was dead, she came to believe it was only Sam they failed—they allowed his brother to dominate him, to wear him down. Maybe if Silas had been the older one, they would have pushed back harder. Maybe there was some part of them that believed Sam ought to be able to fend for himself, being bigger and (so they thought, at first, and maybe they were right) smarter. Maybe they knew all along he was gay, maybe on some level it made them uncomfortable. C’mon, don’t be a pussy, fight back. Later, when Sam came out to them, the first Christmas of his college career, she wondered if Silas had ever abused him, had subjected him to incest, if Silas had somehow made him gay. Nothing in her memory would suggest that Sam had ever been anything but what he was, yet she thought it nevertheless. Derek too. Sam’s sexuality a problem, Silas its cause.

  But that’s what Silas was like. Even in death, he dominated their thoughts, their way of seeing. The likelihood of Silas’s influence simply seemed greater than the likelihood of random chance; Silas was easy to blame things on, when so much was his fault.

  Wasn’t it?

  Elisa’s palms are starting to itch. Minefield is mesmerizing, mercurial; to read his helpful posts is harrowing. Does this make sense to you? I’m not sure that’s the best example. If that doesn’t work, let me know, I’ve got another idea, too. It’s too perfect, too reassuring, too accommodating; reading it, you wait, hushed, for the explosion, you sense everyone on the forum waiting with you. And then someone, some hapless newb, betrays his ignorance—wait uh I dont get it what?—and Silas pounces.

  She wonders now what she did then—is it all theater? Is the charmer merely a stalking horse for the bully? Or is the charmer for real, a genuine part of Silas that he simply can’t sustain? If it’s real, what does it feel like for him, proffering this part of himself, then having to snatch it back? Is he ashamed? Does he feel remorse?

  They should have asked themselves that more often, she thinks. When he was bad, they punished him, or tried to. But maybe it hurt him to be bad. Maybe he wasn’t so hard, in the end—maybe it was all armor, a way of defending his most sentimental, most vulnerable self.

  But she doesn’t like to think about that. If that’s true, then they did it wrong. If that’s true, then Silas is more like her than she wants to admit.

  21.

  Elisa tells Becca she’s having a business lunch with somebody from Killian Tech, and will be back at two. Becca doesn’t seem surprised or concerned, and Elisa walks out into the July sun.

  Killian Tech is her lab—the one that, in her memory, she was managing just a few days ago. It’s a dozen blocks from the Levinson Center, closer to the lake, and she walks briskly, suffering in the heat.

  The people, the houses all look familiar. She is alert for differences in this world that do not involve her husband and sons. But none are evident. That’s not to say they don’t exist, only that she has never been as observant as she might have liked to think. How could she be? Her thoughts have always been more in
teresting to her than the world itself. She remembers what she liked best about her lab work: data. Having data to pore over, on the filthy computer in the corner by the window, while the other students fussed at their experiments behind her. She loved that world, the world of abstract representation. She loved making numbers make sense. That’s what she did here, at her old lab.

  The Killian Tech building is a flat, one-story structure with windows on all sides. It used to be dental offices and is wedged incongruously into a residential neighborhood. Its owner, her employer, lives in fear of zoning complaints from neighbors. But so far there haven’t been any. They’re quiet and unobtrusive.

  Elisa’s office is on the northeast corner of the building, facing a bus stop and a NO PARKING sign. From the sidewalk, through the windows, it looks more or less the same: a desk and computer, some plants. She made few changes to it when she took the job, and whoever is working there now clearly took the same approach. Where Elisa had hung a black-and-white photograph of a cobblestone street, this person has hung a diploma. The filing cabinet is larger—Elisa had always meant to do that. There’s a photo of a blond-haired woman on the desk, and a little wooden box containing some sand, some stones, and a tiny rake.

  She pretends to wait for the bus but continues to watch the workings of the office. The techs aren’t visible from here—most of the lab facilities are behind an interior wall, where the light can be controlled. But she doesn’t recognize the people coming and going through the lab door. Of course she hired many of the techs herself and wasn’t here to do so, in this world.

  Eventually a thin man walks into the office, smiles at her through the window, and sits down. He begins to read his e-mail. She remembers doing the same thing: meeting the gaze of bus passengers, turning to her work.