Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  This reminds her of something. She does a search for “William James multiverse.”

  Betsy was right, James coined the term. There are many hits. One of them is a forum, MetaphysicsNet. She reads it for a while. Past lives, alien intelligence, magnetic energy, parallel worlds. The parallel worlds subforum is crowded and extremely active. It’s a hot topic, thanks to recent movies and television shows. There are a lot of threads discussing its plausibility, based on scientific and psychological research.

  She bookmarks the site, turns off the browser, does a bit of work. Judith comes in, closes the door behind her, whispers “I fucked him,” in reference to whom Elisa can’t remember, then describes the encounter in detail. Elisa has come to like Judith, she has to admit. Judith is full of life. Judith is abidingly real. In this world, Elisa clearly has come to appreciate things that are alive and present. This Elisa is more accepting. Talking with Judith, she thinks she ought to adopt this way of being, then bristles at the notion that, in yet another way, the worlds are bleeding together.

  When Judith is gone, Elisa tips her head back, gazes at the sprinkler and water pipes overhead, falls asleep. She dreams that she is performing oral sex on Larry, that he fills her up like a water balloon, and she begins emitting heat and light like a sun. She wakes up gagging and gasping for breath. Her neck hurts.

  The working day is over. Derek picks her up. They go home, eat, drink, end up making love, though without particular intensity, and for no apparent reason other than that it has been a while. They go to sleep. Drifting off she thinks, All of this is impossible, we’re doing impossible things. People do impossible things, all day long.

  35.

  A few days later she is reading an e-mail she has received from a man named Hugo Bonaventure. It’s full of exclamation points. He’ll be on campus all day Tuesday and Wednesday! He would love to talk about the multiverse! There’s a cell number.

  Clearly this is Betsy’s friend. When she gets to work, she calls him.

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Mr. Bonaventure?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  They agree to meet the next day. His office is in the Keller Center, about as far from the biology department as it’s possible to get and still be on campus. When it’s time to go, she wishes she’d brought shorts and a floppy hat, as the air is very hot under a cloudless sky. She is glad, however, that she has abandoned the pretense of bringing formal shoes to work, and now wears sneakers all day.

  She remembers the last long walk she took in Wisconsin, before the switch—around the cemetery and the park down the road. She stood over Silas’s grave and for the first time didn’t cry. She felt sadness, but also acceptance and relief. The memories this act stirred up were mostly memories of other visits to this cemetery, when her feelings had been more profound. (This is what happens, she supposes, to dramatic events: they create feelings that create other feelings, memories that give way to memories of having them. The older you get, the more life seems like a tightening spiral of nostalgia and narcissism, and the actual palpable world recedes into insignificance, replaced by a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. The sunshine today agrees: it has rendered the town in high relief, grainy and posterized, the colors too bright. So fake it’s a new kind of real.)

  But the main thing that day was the trip itself, the way it fit into what her life had become. A ritual for her to wrap her guilt and grief in, so that she could separate it from the rest of her days. And then, eventually, this package, this bundle, began to feel familiar. Comfortable to carry, easy to set aside.

  This was the year she realized she had moved on. As much as that was possible. She realized that she had moved on, that her life had been restored to her. And then the thing that happened happened.

  She wishes she’d brought a bottle of water, though the walk is less than a mile. By the time she’s nearly there she’s sweaty and her bra and sneakers are chafing. She needs new clothes. She needs some air-conditioning.

  The Keller Center for Theory and Practice is a kind of science-meets-humanities think tank, housed in a nineteenth-century brick mansion. Professors inside and outside of the college apply for fellowships there; they are supposed to get new ideas about their work by talking to one another. They hold monthly lectures and receptions, which she has never attended. Or maybe this version of her has—she doubts it, though. She arrives ten minutes early and stumbles in through the heavy oaken front door, expecting to find a receptionist, some cubicles—an office. Instead the place has the look and feel of somebody’s house—someone unusually tidy but blind to the ravages of time. The front room, a parlor really, contains too many sofas, all of them worn and lopsided and from the seventies. She flops down on one and spread-eagles herself, her burning limbs.

  The building is silent, save for a slow pulsing drone that must be an air conditioner: it is very cool here. A broad low table before her is covered with academic journals and, oddly, back issues of a glossy men’s magazine. Light is blasting through the leaded windows but the room still seems gloomy. She likes it—she wants to move in.

  The next thing she knows somebody is poking her in the shoulder and she is reflexively wiping drool from her face.

  “’Ello? ’Ello? Is Missus Brown?”

  “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

  She gathers in her arms and legs, blinks, tries to look over her shoulder. But he isn’t there.

  He’s in front of her now, on the sofa across from her, a tall gangly man in shorts and button-down shirt. She can barely make out his face, as he is backlit by the blazing afternoon sun. But his hair, his massive ball of curly reddish-blond hair, glows so brightly she can see the shape of his skull beneath it.

  “Is very comfortable here, no?”

  “I guess the heat did me in.”

  “So you are tired, yes, I see. We will talk right here then, okay?”

  “Where is… are you the only one here?”

  “Yes! They have all gone away in summer!” He flutters his hands.

  “Of course.”

  “So! So! I am speaking to Betsy Orosco! You want to talk about the multiverse! This is good, people like it, it’s in the TV shows and movies a lot, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  He’s so tall, and the sofa he sits on so old and sunken, that his knees come up to the middle of his chest. He keeps them spread far apart and his legs are very hairy and she can see right up the leg of his shorts to the outline of his balls underneath a pair of white briefs. Somehow this seems cosmic, profound. Why does a man need two? Why not just one, a big one, dangling beneath the penis like a veined and whiskered egg? No, it has to be twins. She thinks of the poor redundant sperm, born daily and reabsorbed, unused, by the body: a cycle, the two balls in tandem, equal partners, competitors perhaps, in this Sisyphean undertaking. She laughs, but it comes out as something more like a sob.

  “So…” says Hugo Bonaventure. “Something unusual, correct, you are saying is happening to you, yes?”

  “Something unusual, uh huh.” She sits up straighter now, rubbing her face. She still can’t quite make out Bonaventure’s features.

  “You are professor of what?”

  “It’s not… I’m not a professor. I work here. At the college.”

  “Okay, okay…”

  “I am just a regular person,” she says, and marvels that those words would ever come out of her mouth. “I just want to know.”

  “Okay, okay…”

  He nods, nods, is waiting for her to speak. And it occurs to her that she has no idea what she wants to say. There is a long silence.

  “How much did Betsy tell you? About my… situation?”

  “Just, how do you say,” he replies, making curves in the air with his hands, as though illustrating a voluptuous woman, “you give me the, not the silhouette?”

  She doesn’t understand, and then she does. “Outline.”

  “Yes, the outline, thank you, yes. I make the recording?”

  He ta
ps his shirt pocket, where there is a bulge the size of a pack of cigarettes. She understands that he has a tape recorder in there and is requesting her approval. Without thinking she tells him sure.

  She collects herself and goes through it all for him. Her life before it happened, the trip to Wisconsin, the drive, the moment of change. The differences. She tells him about telling Amos Finley, “my psychiatrist,” she calls him. Toward the end of this monologue Hugo Bonaventure appears to grow agitated, impatient. She has discovered that if she closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them while they are trained on his face, she can catch a glimpse of it before her pupils contract from the light. His nose and chin are long, his eyes deep. He appears handsome and a little bit frightening, an exemplar of that extreme kind of effete masculinity accessible only to men without the slightest awareness of its existence. “Okay, okay,” he says. “Okay, okay.”

  “Yes?”

  There is a pause, punctuated by nodding, as though he is charging himself up. He says, “Okay, you say this moment, there is a change, can you give the description again? Of what it is like?”

  “All right.” She tells it again, more slowly this time, trying to add detail. The positions of the clouds. The rivets on the guardrail. The shape of the crack in the windshield. She nearly chokes up describing the crack, realizing that she might never see it again. The chip, like a leaning triangle, where a rock struck it, and the strange way the crack rises from it, ruler-straight, for six inches before it veers off to the left, then right, and heads for the upper corner of the glass. Hugo Bonaventure nods, taps his bare knees with his long fingers.

  “Yes, yes, I ask you questions now, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “When this happens, yes?, there is a sound?”

  “What kind of sound?”

  “I don’t know this,” he says, “only you know this, the kind of sound. Maybe there is a ring, a vibration, something—” He claps his hands together and the claps echo off the high ceiling. “—something like a pop, a bang?”

  She had not considered this possibility. A pop? A bang? She says, “The window was open, and then it was closed. So the wind noise was gone—the wind shut off.”

  “Yes?”

  “But it was smooth. The change. The old car, it was noisier, and the new one is quiet. More solid. Everything went quiet.”

  “So a lack of sound. But no pop, bang, ring.”

  “No,” she says. “Nothing like that.”

  “Okay, tell me, okay, do you smell something different? Or in the air, yes, there is some kind of crackle? Current?” He raises his hands and wiggles his fingers. She can hear them whispering against one another. “You feel anything on your skin? Something electrical? Or maybe some flash, there is light, not outside light but inside, on your retinas, you see?, the pop of light, the impulse, pop!, you see?”

  “Yes, I see. Let me think,” she says. She is trying to remember. The smell. Yes, it changed. There was the smell of the road and of the dusty interior of the Honda and then the stale recirculated air and plasticky odor of the new car. And the temperature changed, and there was the movement of air, of the hairs on her arm. But there was no pop, no flash. There was no smell that didn’t seem to come from what was around her.

  She tells him this. She says it was smooth, the transition: sudden, but clean. “There were no… artifacts. From the change itself. It didn’t feel like something was happening. It was just, there was one thing, and then there was another.”

  If he is disappointed in this, he doesn’t let on. He says, “Okay, very good, now I tell you straight from the bat, yes, maybe I think you are delusional? But perhaps not?”

  “Uh… all right.”

  “But this is a thing we, that is, science, this notion, this idea, it is something real? We think, there are many ways for an event to transpire, the laws of physics allow this, there are probabilities, and all these probabilities are perhaps real, they have the same chance of being real, you see? A thing happens, any thing at all, it creates the universe of happening and the universe of not-happening. Do you understand? Always there is the branching, and every branch is a universe, and they are all real.”

  Her skin is puckering as the sweat evaporates from it and she shivers. She stops trying to make out Hugo Bonaventure’s face. He’s just a blank surrounded by light. That’s enough. She says, “So this is real? The worlds are real?”

  “Well, okay, sure. This idea of real, maybe this is not so important for the physics, do the math, maybe it’s a little fanciful, one can make it with the math, sure, but to test it, how do you do this, okay?, how do you make the experiment?”

  Her shivering has intensified. She feels very strange—as though her body is making energy. As though she is not quite in control of it. She clenches herself, clamps down on herself from the inside, in an effort not to melt here, to lose herself. The sofa is very soft and she feels very far down in it.

  Hugo Bonaventure says, “This group, my colleagues, they do an experiment, okay? They take the tiny metal, like a tongue, a tiny thing, you barely see it with your eye, yes?, and they make it very cold, it is called the ground state, the lowest possible energy, yes? And here, at this place, the metal, because it is small and cold, here you don’t have the disruption to the quantum state, correct? So they can make the measurements. And they pluck this metal—” He reaches out and flicks a finger. “—they pluck it, and they see that it is vibrating, yes? But it is also not vibrating.”

  He pauses, as if to let this sink in. She is nodding now, nodding the way he is nodding: they are nodding at one another.

  “This is, then, okay, the universe where the object is plucked and the universe where the object is not plucked. My friends, they test it, they see both states.”

  “Both universes?” she asks him. “At once?”

  “That is correct, yes, yes.”

  “You’re saying they have seen this? Another universe?”

  “They do, they see this.”

  She says, “Could they see me? The other me?”

  He gets up. He paces for a moment in front of the coffee table. She is still fixated on the spot he has left: the image of his head, the void his head has imprinted on her vision, is left behind.

  “Not quite, no, this is not possible. You are far too large.” He lets out a kind of cackle. “Ha ha!, no, I cannot say that to a woman, but yes, you are too large for the physics to see. The outside forces, they push against you, yes?, they disrupt the quantum state. But maybe they can test!”

  “Test me?”

  He suddenly lopes around to her side of the coffee table and sits down beside her. She can see him clearly now: here he is. In profile, he is a study in extremes: his nose and chin appear even longer now, and bent, his brow a shelflike protrusion. His body gives off a moist nervous heat, and she realizes that the air-conditioning has made her really, really cold. The long pants that tortured her on the way over are now woefully inadequate.

  He points to her bag, which she has brought with her and which is sitting on the floor between her sneakered feet. He is snapping the fingers of both hands. “You can give me, what do you say, two possessions?”

  “I… possessions?”

  “Two things you own, okay? One thing you have in both universes, the other one you have only here. Ha!, we would like the thing only from the other universe, but you can’t give this!”

  Elisa picks up the bag, holds it on her lap like an animal. “You want to take my things and… test them?”

  “Not me to test them, my friends in California! No lab for this here, ha ha, sorry New York State, it’s not so good. But my friends, they are doing this research, they can test maybe, okay? You give me two things, I send them, maybe we find something out, you never know.” And he puts out a palm and beckons with his long fingers.

  She gets it. One thing from here, one thing from there. She opens up her bag, roots around. The first thing she sees is a tube of lipstick she bought for an academi
c dinner years ago, some gala thing involving a guest of Derek’s department, to which she had been persuaded to go. She used it that one time but didn’t like the color, and doesn’t like lipstick, and she never used it again. But here it is. She removes it and hands it over to Hugo Bonaventure.

  “This was in the other place,” she says.

  “Okay, okay, very nice,” he replies, and wedges it into the breast pocket of his shirt, beside the tape recorder. She’s a little disconcerted—shouldn’t he place it in some kind of specimen bag, affix a little label to it, something? But he’s the scientist here, not her, not anymore.

  She peers into her bag again. The light is dim; it’s hard to see. There’s her driver’s license, which is different from her old one, but she needs that. She opens one side pocket, then the other. Shoves her hand into each. Comes out with a piece of paper.

  It’s the list, the five rules. The paper is creased and furred, the words, in her own hand, blurry and fading. She reads,

  4. Account for your time.

  Her fingers fold the paper, pointlessly, in half, concealing the list, and she hands it to Hugo Bonaventure.

  “And this is from only here?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “It is, how to say it, it is not from recent, but it is before you see the change?”

  She nods. “That’s right. It’s old. It was in my bag when I got here.”

  His acceptance of this strange frame of reference appears total. He tucks the paper, insouciantly, into the pocket with the lipstick.

  And then, abruptly, he stands up and sticks out his hand. “Well! Okay! I send these things away!”

  “I… well, all right then.”

  She takes the hand, thinking he means to shake, but in fact he pulls and she rises, involuntarily, to her feet. For a moment she thinks she might topple over, but she manages to right herself, with the help of his free hand on her shoulder.

  “Ha ha!” he says. “It is like we do the dance.”

  Her limbs ache—the air-conditioning has frozen her muscles solid. She feels dizzy and tiny lights zoom across her field of vision. Hugo Bonaventure is saying something. Then he is withdrawing, crossing the room, climbing the stairs. He waves from the landing, and Elisa waves back.