Familiar

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Familiar Page 11

by J. Robert Lennon


  “Who are you e-mailing?”

  His back is to her. He has opened the coffeemaker and is dumping the grounds in the trash under the sink. He does this with the brusque, exaggerated movements that suggest displeasure at her not already having done it.

  She says, “The therapist is suggesting a private session. With me. He cc’ed you.”

  “What therapist?” he asks, filling the coffee urn with water.

  She says, “Our therapist.”

  “Why are you calling him ‘the therapist’?”

  “Sorry,” she says, after a moment. “Amos.”

  He doesn’t respond. Something in the curve of his back indicates that he believes he’s being fucked with. Please, Derek, she wants to say, it’s me! But she says nothing.

  He asks her, “So when are you going?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why not?” Derek turns, straddles the stool across the table from her. Behind him the coffeemaker begins to pant and moan.

  Instead of answering, she says, “It’s strange that he’s e-mailing at this hour.”

  “It’s strange that you are.”

  Their eyes meet. His hand reaches for a mug of coffee that isn’t there yet. Fluidly he transforms this motion into a gentle stroking of the table’s surface.

  And just like that she would like to have sex with him. She is startled by the thought, and he seems to notice, and to notice what it is that caught her attention. He moves, just barely—the head cocked a fraction of an inch, the single eyebrow twitching over one eye. She closes the laptop, slides down off the stool, and walks out of the kitchen without a glance behind her. She takes off her nightgown on the way up the stairs. By the time she’s standing naked by the bed he has crossed the threshold of the bedroom, his robe billowing around him.

  It’s quick and intense. His body is better here. Stronger. He doesn’t seem younger—indeed, he looks and feels his age. But this is better than the concealing softness of the other Derek. Her own, heavier body feels more erotic. She makes no sound other than a single deep involuntary groan.

  For those moments there is nothing to apologize for and everything makes sense.

  They lie beside each other, touching at the hip. Down in the kitchen, the coffeemaker beeps five times.

  “You’re different,” he says, this time without hostility or accusation.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Not entirely.”

  For a moment she thinks he’s going to let it go. Then, “Do you want to tell me what part you know?”

  “Not yet,” she says.

  “Will you tell Amos?”

  “No.”

  Immediately she feels this is the wrong answer. Does it violate a rule? But he slides his hand up onto her hip and across her belly. Perhaps this is something they haven’t had together for some time: a small secret.

  25.

  Two hours later they have eaten breakfast and drunk their coffee in comfortable silence. It’s almost possible to consider the situation normal. There’s a newspaper to read, so she stares at the words for a while, turns the pages. She tries and fails to empty her mind.

  In the afternoon Derek goes out on errands. She opens her laptop and finds an email from Sam:

  Mom

  Nice hearing from you

  No time/money to travel

  Sorry

  Sam

  She reads the message several times. It feels heavy with meaning. After a few minutes’ thought, she writes back: I want to come see you. She sends it before she can change her mind.

  A few minutes’ idle clicking later, she shuts the laptop, paces around the kitchen. They keep a phone list magneted to the fridge in the old life, but here there’s nothing. She opens and closes several drawers, then finds an address book—neatly maintained, implausibly, in her own hand—in the drawer under the phone. She looks under Brown and then Sam, and finds an address, two phone numbers.

  She picks up the phone, stares at the keypad. Puts it down, goes to the front window. No Derek. Goes back to the phone and calls the first number.

  There’s a click, and then she can hear a city street. For a moment, no one speaks.

  Elisa says, “Hello?”

  Sam says “Hi,” elongating it into a question.

  “Are you all right?”

  Another pause, and then, “Sure. Are you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” Elisa lets out breath and experiences a moment of lightness, dizziness. Relief. She hasn’t understood until now just how anxious she has been, how terrified of this moment. And for what? That he wouldn’t be real. But here he is. She hears a car horn, voices speaking Spanish. “I’m sorry I’ve been… out of touch,” she says.

  “Uh huh…”

  “This must seem… it must be strange to hear from me.”

  “Yeah… yeah…”

  “Thanks for your e-mail. Did you get mine? I guess you didn’t, I just sent it.”

  “Oh really?”

  “I want to come to see you.” She hesitates. “You and your brother.”

  He doesn’t respond to that. He seems to be speaking to someone else—buying something at a store, perhaps. Somebody thanks him in a foreign accent. After a moment, she goes on.

  “I hope that he hasn’t… I hope Silas isn’t… hurting you, Sam. Or making things… harder for you.”

  There’s a long pause. Elisa feels the need to fill it.

  “I realize that things haven’t been good between us. For a while now. I… want to rectify that. Start to rectify that. If you’ll let me. Some things have happened to me—” And here, she is suddenly and unexpectedly moved, and her throat closes. She has to pause. She takes a breath, says, “Some things have happened to, to change the way I see my life. And I need to try to make things right. With you and Silas.”

  He laughs, but it’s fake—forced.

  “Sam?”

  “That guy.” The voice has changed now.

  Elisa says, “I don’t—”

  “Silas.”

  Here in the kitchen, she becomes aware of the ticking of the wall clock, and it seems very loud. Her voice is very loud, even though she is nearly whispering. “Is there a problem with—”

  “That guy is such a dick. Seriously. He’s so mean to me.”

  A chill goes through her. The receiver creaks in her hand: she is holding it tight enough to break it.

  The voice that comes out of it says, “He’s so mean! I hate him. I wish he would just leave me alone.”

  She says nothing.

  “Boo hoo hoo,” says the voice.

  “Silas,” Elisa says.

  “I do hope you’ll visit, Mom. Maybe you can tell him to stop bothering me? He never listens to me. Whoops,” he says, “gotta run. It was great talking to you!” And the conversation is ended with a click.

  She has just spoken to her dead son on the phone.

  Forty-five minutes later, the sound of Derek’s truck rouses her from sleep. She is on the sofa, her head tipped back on the cushions at a strange angle. Her neck hurts. Derek walks in and his body language communicates disapproval. He dislikes napping in general. In the other life, he overcame this prejudice, with effort. She sits up. “Hi.”

  “You’re not getting enough sleep.”

  “No, I guess not. Where were you?”

  “Home Depot,” he says. He’s wearing a very clean pair of jeans and an old tee shirt and standing on the living room carpet with a plastic sack dangling from his hand. It is about to start to seem strange, his standing there, when he lets out a small grunt and sits down. He drops the bag on the floor and takes her numb hands into his. “This morning,” he says, “was nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to go see Amos. Please.”

  She makes herself sit up, cranes her neck, trying to get the kink out. Derek releases her hands and begins to rub her shoulders.

  “Thank you.”

  “Will you go?”

&
nbsp; She wants to answer him, but it’s as though the whole charade has hit a wall. She exhales, feeling his hands on her. Her throat tightens and her breath catches and she tells herself that she isn’t going to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “This is… everything has gone insane this week. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

  “We have to put this behind us,” she says, finally. A shot in the dark. “Amos. Everything.”

  Her eyes are closed, she can’t see his reaction. But there is despair in his voice as he says, “I don’t understand how you can say that.”

  “We can do it. We have done it.”

  “I haven’t. I haven’t, not yet.”

  But she meant in the other life. For a moment she wants, very badly, to tell him. To come clean. She remembers how it felt last night, the secret between them, the information she planned to conceal from Amos. A path to a new life, a third one, that begins right now.

  Isn’t this something she has wanted, every now and then? Hasn’t everyone wanted this? To just throw it all overboard, the bad decisions of the past, and start over? Her life, at this moment, is a nightmare: she is tired of pretending, she is tired of trying to figure things out. Let it go. Derek would do it with her, he would let it all go. Wouldn’t he?

  A new life. Starting now.

  The phone rings once. Neither of them moves. It doesn’t ring a second time. She feels it, that ring, as if it’s a nail the universe has created, that has pierced her and fixed her to the sofa. She doesn’t move or speak, other than to squeeze Derek’s hand, a gesture that could mean anything. Sorry. Please. Love. Help. Get closer. Go away. In the end, he goes away. He kisses her sweating forehead and disappears with his plastic bag. A few minutes later she hears, from a distant part of the house, the sound of an electric drill.

  That night an e-mail arrives from Sam: I don’t get it. What are you doing? When Derek goes to sleep, she books a plane ticket for California.

  26.

  By the end of the following week she has mastered her job. It hasn’t been hard. To other people, she has just appeared forgetful. She’s made up for it with excessive cheerfulness. Half her day she spends online, following Silas on messageboards. She thinks she has found iterations of him in other places—other gaming forums, a forum about motorcycles, another one about serial killers. The latter, she discovers, is famous for rumors that some members of it are actually murderers—twice in the past, apparently, new members who joined discussions of killings turned out to be the killers. Silas is very interested in this phenomenon—he is always accusing people of being killers, and then, as on his game developers’ forum, ends up temporarily banned. Finding him has been easy—though he uses different names on every forum, he always has the same signature line on his posts, an unattributed quotation: He saw himself in a strange city with his friend, except that the face of his friend was different.

  The first part of the week went this way: after work on Tuesday, she appeared at the usual time to be picked up by Derek. But instead of getting into the car, she leaned in the window and told him she wasn’t going to therapy. If he was going home, she would ride with him. But if he was going to see Amos, she would walk.

  He appeared stricken. He gazed through the windshield and gripped the steering wheel with both hands and said, “I’m going to go.”

  “I’ll walk home.”

  “In those shoes?”

  “I brought sneakers.”

  They looked at each other. She should have kissed him. Instead she took a step back. He said, “Lisa. Are you going to leave me?”

  For too long, she said nothing. Because that’s another thing she could do with this third life. She could start over on her own. But she did eventually say, “No.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I love you.”

  She sounded certain of it, to her own ears, but she didn’t know if she meant it or if her conviction came from her need to say it. Derek accepted it, accepted her love. He drove away. And she changed into her sneakers there on the curb and walked home. And in fact she has continued to walk home every day, even in the rain.

  Now it’s Friday, not quite noon. She could leave if she wanted to, but this office has slowly turned into a sanctuary. She likes it here: it’s the place where she knows what’s going on. She has a set of papers in her hand—printouts of some budget material for an interdepartmental committee, on which handwritten notes have been made. It needs to go to physics. She reaches for a campus mail envelope, then stops herself. It’s a nice day.

  Physics is on the other side of the science quad. She walks in a perfectly straight line, ignoring the cement paths, cutting through the grass, diverging only to avoid hitting trees. A young Asian man holds the heavy wooden door open for her; she nods her thanks.

  The office is hot. They don’t have air-conditioning, for some reason—just fans. There is a sense here of confusion and dishevelment—she likes it. She finds the department’s equivalent of herself and hands her the papers. But of course that’s not really why she came, is it. She doesn’t admit it to herself until she is standing at the front desk, where the assistant, a woman around her own age, is chatting with a second woman, this one younger. They are talking about a movie they have both seen.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Elisa says to the assistant. “But I have kind of a strange question.”

  Both women look at her.

  “Is anyone in this department—any of the scientists—studying the concept of… other… that is, parallel, or multiple, universes?”

  The assistant says, “Like science fiction?”

  “Well—not really. Or I guess maybe, but I mean in reality.” She feels like a fool.

  “Oh, geez, I really don’t know,” the assistant says.

  Elisa claps her hands together, steps back from the desk. “Thanks. Sorry to bother you.” Only once she’s nearly to the stairs does she let out breath—she doesn’t know what made her think that was a good idea.

  But a voice stops her—“Hey! Uh, hello?” It’s the young woman. She is half-jogging down the hall, in the manner of someone who rarely moves faster than walking speed.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey!” The girl is out of breath. She arrives where Elisa is standing, gets a panicked look in her eye, takes half a step back. “I’m a postdoc here?”

  “Ah.” She is small and cute—cat-eye glasses, blue hair. A physics woman.

  “I’m Betsy. I’m… yeah. So the multiverse?”

  “Oh! I’m Elisa. Is that your field? Parallel… whatever?” She’s embarrassed now—embarrassed to utter these words in this building, embarrassed to say “whatever” to a woman half her age.

  “No, no. I’m doing experimental stuff—radiation patterns from quarks.”

  “I see.”

  Betsy takes a wallet out of the pocket of her jeans—a man’s wallet—and slides a business card out from behind her driver’s license. Her hands are trembling slightly. Elisa is impressed, for some reason, that she has business cards. It reads BETSY OROSCO, PHYSICS. And a web address. “That’s my site,” she says. “It’s kind of a… physics blog?”

  “Cool,” Elisa says, and feels herself blush.

  But the girl is encouraged. “Yeah, and, ah… I’m kind of interested in this stuff. The multiverse stuff. I mean, I post about it sometimes. It’s a hobby.”

  “Physicists have hobbies?”

  “Yeah, more physics!”

  Betsy invites her into her office, and Elisa follows her to the end of the hallway, up a flight of stairs, and around a corner. They have to duck as they pass beneath an inexplicably low section of ceiling, and then they’re in a little cul-de-sac with three doors. Betsy opens the one on the left and leads Elisa inside.

  The office is intimate, cramped even, but higher than it is broad, with bookshelves on three walls covered with textbooks, papers, and unusual objects: toys, oddly shaped bits of wood, machine parts, circuit boards. The fourth wall is empty sa
ve for a tall narrow window. In front of the window there is a green aluminum desk, and, on a filthy Oriental rug, two stained aluminum-frame upholstered chairs. Betsy climbs behind the desk. It bears two laptop computers, a cell phone, and many stacks of books and papers. Elisa sits in one of the chairs, which is familiarly uncomfortable. She says, “How long have you been working here?”

  “A year.”

  “You’ve really made yourself at home.”

  Betsy’s face reddens. “I like to make a nest.” And then, surprisingly, she says, “I’m thirty-two, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “Did you think I was younger?”

  “I admit I did.”

  “My mother says I’ll look like I’m twenty until I’m forty, and then I’ll suddenly look sixty.”

  Elisa says, “Thanks, Mom.”

  Betsy settles in her chair until its back rests against the windowsill. The motion upsets a small cactus there, and its pot clanks faintly against another one sitting beside it. The younger woman doesn’t seem to notice. “I know, right?” she says, laughing. “But she thinks I’m a lesbian and that science is a phase I’m going through. So yeah but…” She leans forward. “Do you know you could make a universe? Like, in a lab?”

  Elisa doesn’t say anything.

  “Or your house even.”

  “Really.”

  “In theory! I mean, I can’t. You can’t. Well, maybe you can, what do I know.”

  Betsy is excited. She seems to enjoy having Elisa here. Out the window behind her a corner of the building is visible, this very building, and beyond it the science quad. They are in some kind of wing or extension. Yet this seems miraculous somehow, an optical anomaly. A building that is visible from inside itself.

  “How?” Elisa asks her.

  “I was just reading about this. You’d need a seed. A little tiny thing. Ten pounds of matter, packed into a really tiny space. And if it’s all packed in there enough—so that it’s basically a black hole—then the repulsive component of gravity, which yes there is such a thing, should be enough, once you trigger it, to expand that matter into a whole other universe.”

  Elisa says, “A little tiny one.”

 

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