Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  After a moment, he says, “I have no fucking idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Some rotten shit from the fridge, I don’t know. This is why you’re here? You break into my house to ask me this?”

  She says, “You have to let your brother go.”

  Silas squints at her. He drums his fingers on the tabletop; his other hand twitches on his bare knee. He looks like he should be smoking a cigarette and indeed glances around as if one might be there, freshly lit, waiting for his fingers.

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “Whatever you’ve done to him. Made him do. The money you stole. Let him go. Let him come home. Solve your own problems yourself.”

  Silas leans back, shaking his head. He holds out his palms. “What did he tell you—I made him do it? Steal?”

  She waits.

  “For what? My company?” He shakes his head. “No. I got problems, but I have a fucking life. He’s the one with the real problems. Whatever he’s stealing, it went up his nose or in his arm, it didn’t go to me. And I’m risking my career to cover his ass. I would love for him to walk out that door,” Silas says, pointing, leaning toward her across the table. “I’m sick of his shit. I share my house with him, my fucking work, everything, and he just fucks everything up. It’s a good thing the startup fell apart, because he would have just fucked that up, too, right when it started getting good.”

  Elisa hesitates. Doubt is creeping in. To look at them, to look at both boys, the state of their rooms, she could believe him. But she doesn’t.

  “Your girl,” she says. “Do you share her, too?”

  Silas is shaking his head before she has even finished speaking. He throws his arm over the back of the chair. “Wow,” he says. “Wow, that’s awesome. Is that what he’s telling you?

  “Look,” he goes on, “None of this is any of your business, Lisa, okay?” He’s angry, his eyes are hard, but there is something strange in his voice, something she doesn’t recognize, that is almost like sympathy. Was it always there? Even in the world she remembers? No, she tells herself, no, this world is different. It couldn’t have been there. “You threw us over,” he is saying. “That was your prerogative. But now it’s mine to tell you to fuck off. If you want to take Sam with you when you do, more power to you. I would love it. Maybe then I wouldn’t lose my job over him. But either do it, and leave me alone, or don’t do it, and leave us both alone. My job is none of your business, my girlfriend is none of your business, the shit on my counter is none of your business. I could have predicted this,” he says, looking tired and old. “That you would change your mind. What about Derek? Him too? Is he on board with this?”

  She can’t speak.

  “That’s what I thought. No, he makes too much fucking sense for that.”

  He stands up, pushes his chair in. She is surprised at how tall he is: he hadn’t finished growing when he died. She wouldn’t have predicted it. Again he gestures with his hand as though there’s a cigarette in it. “You ought to go back to that shrink and have your head examined.” He looks at the ceiling, then back at her. “I can’t believe you did this. Came out here. Incredible.”

  “You should move your back door key,” she says, and she is trying to sound defiant, but she just sounds like his mother telling him to put his things away. He is showing her his back, he is walking out of the room. “It took me ten seconds to find it.”

  Sitting there, illicitly, in her sons’ kitchen, she is feeling her mind begin to rebel against it all: it would like to shut down now, reject everything, begin work on its own reality, some happy fantasy where it could exist in peace. But she has to resist: she has to consider whether or not Silas might be telling the truth. If perhaps she is wrong, and has always been wrong. About Silas and Sam and everything, in every possible world.

  The answer can be found—Derek knows, Amos knows, Sam knows. Here, in this life, all the men have the information, and her role is to extract it, to wheedle it out of them, to beg them for it.

  Silas is halfway down the hall now. She says, “Silas, wait!” And to her surprise he does, he stands there with his hand on the wall, close to where she touched it minutes ago. His back is to her. He’s waiting.

  “Where did you go? That time you ran away, when you were fifteen.”

  His hand drops from the wall and he half-turns toward her. He appears exhausted.

  She says, “You remember—your lost weekend. You left school and didn’t come back for days. Where were you? What did you do? We searched and searched.” In her voice is real conviction, as if she actually remembers it, as if it actually happened.

  But Silas is shaking his head. “I just wanted to be alone,” he said. “That’s all. I went off to be alone.”

  For a second he looks as though he’s finished; he shifts his weight, he shows her his back. But then he turns back to face her. “And I didn’t run away,” he says. “I walked. It was easy. I just walked away and nobody followed me.”

  And now, as if in illustration, he does exactly that: walks down the hall, away from her, opens the bedroom door and passes through. The door closes, gently, and then everything is quiet again.

  42.

  She has one more day here. She has an idea about what to do, but isn’t sure how to go about it. So she lies on her hotel bed, dozes for a short while, tries calling Sam several times. He doesn’t answer.

  Around noon she heads for the coffee shop she went to the previous day. There’s a free internet connection—the first fifteen minutes are free, anyway. And her laptop battery is almost dead and she forgot to bring the power supply. But she works fast. Caltech, that’s where Hugo Bonaventure teaches, and it’s nearby. She tries to recall what he told her, the experiment his colleagues performed, and over her coffee finds the name of the man who heads the research team, and his office location. Buses go there: she plots a route. She is aware that it’s Sunday, but scientists are in their labs on Sundays, she certainly remembers that much.

  Of course this occurred to her before she left, though until now it hasn’t coalesced into a plan of action. She has heard nothing from Hugo Bonaventure, and her offers to take Betsy out for coffee have gone unanswered. The plausible explanation she has been craving, the one that lies outside herself, has never seemed farther away. And now, in the wake of her conversations with Silas and Sam, she needs it.

  This world is aberrant and wrong, and somebody needs to tell her this. Even if she can’t go back. She will live in hell if she has to, if only somebody will please tell her that, yes, it’s hell, and she does not belong here.

  The buses are infrequent. She walks a long way to find the right stop, then is too late and she must wait in the heat for the next bus. She makes some transfers. She doesn’t have the right change. She gets off, gets cash, buys some mints and asks for singles. It’s an hour and a half before she reaches the campus, and she is exhausted and hot and feels like finding a tree to lie under and go to sleep. She wishes she’d taken the laptop out of her satchel, left it at the hotel. It’s heavy.

  Caltech is small, all of its buildings clustered within a single large city block. The buildings are dull and angular, sandlike, etched with strange patterns. She walks among them as if dazed, finds the one she wants, consults the directory board in the lobby. The air here is cool and almost nobody is around; she stands at the directory for a long time, listening to the sounds of her own breaths. Finally she climbs the stairs and finds the right office.

  No one’s there, of course; the door is locked. There is a schedule taped to it that refers to the spring semester already passed. She stands, thinking, for several minutes. Then she hears footsteps and looks up.

  It’s a tall young man, heavy and bearded, sweating, in a hurry. He moves past her and keys open a door a few offices down. When she reaches it, he is rummaging through a file cabinet, muttering under his breath.

  “Excuse me?”

  The boy looks up, startled—perhaps he passed her without even
noticing she was there.

  She says, “Where could I find Professor Simmons today?”

  He blinks, stands up straight. “Uh. Lab?”

  “Which building?”

  “Or he might be at home. His wife’s like nine months pregnant.”

  She waits.

  “Downs? Like, right over there.” He points. “I mean, it’s the same building. Just, down the hall and through the double doors.” She’s about to thank him, but he says, “Wait, who are you?”

  “He’s working on something I’m involved in.”

  The boy blinks. He looks like the bass player from a seventies rock band. He says, “Hold on, I’ll take you.” He continues his search through the file drawer, seems to find what he wants in the form of a sheaf of heavily annotated, equation-covered papers. It is quaint, the idea that somebody would need to go somewhere to gather up some papers, in this electronic age. She likes it. The boy ushers her out into the hallway.

  He walks a little too fast for her. She has to sort of run. They pass through the double doors, then another set, and then he stops and asks her to wait before turning to yet another door, this one protected by a proximity reader, in front of which the boy waves a lanyarded ID before entering.

  She leans against a cinder-block wall with her eyes closed. The wall behind her is alive with some deep and thrumming energy. She doesn’t fall asleep, or probably doesn’t. When she opens her eyes a man is standing there. He is tall—are they all tall here?—and clean-shaven, with unkempt sandy hair just beginning to go gray. His cheeks are a bit sunken, his chin too long. He’s dressed in jeans and a tee shirt that says, in a flowing script, Choose Rudeness. He says, not rudely, “You were looking for me?”

  “Professor Simmons?”

  “Yes.”

  Elisa licks her lips. “I’m Elisa Brown,” she says. “A friend of yours sent you some things of mine. Some objects.”

  Puzzlement. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Hugo Bonaventure? He’s at SUNY Reevesport for the semester. That’s where I work.”

  The man’s face is friendly, open, but she understands she doesn’t have much time. The name Hugo Bonaventure does not seem to register with him.

  “It’s your experiment, correct, with the vibrating metal flange? That is also not vibrating?”

  He appears surprised. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “This man Bonaventure, he sent you some things of mine. To test. To see if… if…”

  Simmons is waiting.

  “He said you could determine… where they were from.”

  It takes a moment or two for his mind to churn through the possibilities, to decide that she is mistaken or not worth his time. She wishes there were something, anything, she could say to halt the process, go back in time by a minute or two, devise the perfect appeal to make him listen. But no, he’s done with her, he is shaking his head, he is about to say goodbye.

  Then he says, “Oh wait—that guy?”

  She waits.

  “Curly haired guy? From Belgium or something?”

  “That’s him.”

  Simmons sighs. There’s a bit of sweat on his face, a light sheen, and he wipes it away with his hand. With the other he digs a phone from his pocket and glances at it, at the time.

  He says, “Okay, follow me.”

  They trace her previous path through the building in reverse, and at equally high speed. At some point the phone in Simmons’s hand rings and he begins talking into it about certain grocery items that need to be bought. “I got somebody here,” he says, and pockets the phone, and then they’re at his office door, which he opens with a key attached to a belt loop by a length of string.

  It’s a mess. Elisa is strangely gratified to see an academic office that adheres so completely to type. Books and papers are piled on every surface but two: a chair behind Simmons’s desk, and a chair in front of it. He neither sits in the former nor offers her the latter. He is pawing through a giant pile of mail.

  “He sent me some stuff. The guy.”

  She nods, though he isn’t looking at her and can’t see it. “He says you’re colleagues,” she says.

  “No.”

  “But you know him?”

  “He teaches here. He’s not a scientist. He’s more of a…” His elbow makes contact with a pile of mail, a different one, and it topples, spilling papers and packages onto the floor. “Fuck. He’s more of a gadfly. He’s in HPS.”

  “HPS?”

  Simmons has found what he’s been looking for: a brown padded envelope, torn open at one end. He sticks his hand in. “History and philosophy of science. Google him.” He pulls the hand out, and there they are: her lipstick and list. The envelope is tossed back onto the desk. He offers her the objects.

  “Guy thought I could test them or something. Or asked me to. Probably I’m just part of some little experiment.”

  She takes her things back. The envelope is lying there, still bulging slightly from Simmons’s hand; it is addressed with a marker, in a bold near-scribble. There’s a note inside, no doubt; she wants it. But she can’t bring herself to ask for it. “Experiment?” she says.

  “He pokes scientists, tries to make them react. You know.”

  She says, “So you can’t test them.”

  And now Simmons seems to notice her for the first time. He looks directly into her eyes, scowling slightly, as if in order to figure out what precisely it is he’s got here. She feels like a fool.

  “You really think these things are from another world?” he asks.

  Slowly, she slides the lipstick and list into her satchel. “I don’t know what I think. Something happened to me. I’m just trying to figure it out.”

  He’s nodding, nodding. Elisa is beginning to feel the full force of his concentration. She is attracted to him, to this intensity. It is akin to her own, she feels—or akin to what she once was. “I’m a scientist too,” she blurts. “Or used to be.”

  But Simmons just shakes his head. “That guy isn’t going to help you,” he says, and shows her the door.

  It’s true, what Simmons told her—Hugo Bonaventure is a sociologist. She finds this out ten minutes later, in the computer lab on the first floor, after Googling him, like she was told to do. He is an eccentric, much beloved among undergraduates. He is interested in metaphysics, mass delusion, and the notion of science as religion.

  His résumé is available on the HPS website. It’s many pages long, listing dozens of papers and several co-authored books. Under the heading “Work In Progress” is a study titled “Science Faction: Why We Believe in Alien Abductions, Parallel Worlds, Superpowers, and More.” The names of several collaborators are listed, and one of them happens to be printed on a business card Elisa already has in her satchel, along with a web address, the address of a physics blog she hasn’t yet bothered to visit. She visits it now, and there he is, a collaborator himself. Hugo Bonaventure, collaborator on an ongoing study, “Science Faction,” with Betsy Orosco.

  43.

  On the plane home she begins shaking. She feels no particular emotion; she’s just shaking, as if she’s very cold. But she isn’t cold. The woman sitting beside her leans ostentatiously away and eventually presses the button to summon a flight attendant.

  “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  Elisa’s voice wavers as she says, “I’m fine.”

  “Do you need medical attention, ma’am?”

  “No.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  A few minutes later her teeth are chattering and the hiss of the ventilation system is making her feel sick. The flight attendant comes back with a cup full of ice and a small bottle of gin. Elisa accepts it, pours it. Drinks it.

  Only as she is falling asleep do the tremors subside. She wakes at landing with a desperate need to pee, and hobbles out of the airplane in actual pain. The feeling of release, when she reaches the women’s room, is profound, and she presses her palm to h
er forehead and moans.

  Derek isn’t picking up his cell. It’s Sunday, she doesn’t know what he could be doing. She gets a cab. Out the window it’s cloudy and cool and her body aches from sleeplessness and her bout of shaking.

  At home, something’s different, she isn’t sure what. The truck is missing, but she calls out to Derek anyway. In the bedroom, she dumps her bags on the floor, then lies down on the bed. She falls asleep. When she wakes up it’s dark and she notices that the closet door is open. It looks half empty.

  She walks down the stairs. “Derek?” The only light is from the kitchen, where she finds a piece of paper folded into thirds with her name written on it in his handwriting. She picks it up, turns it over, unfolds it, and reads.

  Lisa,

  I had to leave for now. I need some time to think things over, and I think you do too. I’m staying with a colleague and will be in touch.

  Maybe you’re right and we should revisit the past. But I don’t know why you would go to California instead of telling me what’s going on. I assume you had a bad trip. I hope I’m wrong.

  Sorry

  Derek

  When she’s finished reading it a second time she folds it back up and drops it on the table. Through the open kitchen window, from somewhere far off, she hears the sound of a girl screaming, then the scream trailing off into hysterical laughter. She goes to the refrigerator, pulls out a block of cheese, and eats the entire thing standing there with the door open. Then she goes to the living room and plays the game again.

  PART THREE

  44.

  Time begins to accelerate.

  Elisa spends the next two months attempting to restore her life to the one she lost. She throws out most of the clothes in her closet, then buys new clothes in her old size, as an incentive. She is almost there anyway, having eaten little over the past two weeks, and continues walking back and forth to work.

  She gets an apartment. Derek is shocked; perhaps this is her intention. They have lunch together every week or two, and each time seems, to her, more pointless than the last. Derek’s shock gives way to hurt and eventually to acceptance. She doesn’t tell him anything, and doesn’t ask him anything, about the past. (She does not go to see Amos, either, despite the voicemail messages he’s been leaving.) Soon, she is certain, Derek will realize that there is no longer any real reason to meet, and they’ll stop, and their separation will harden into established fact. Her new place is downtown, four blocks from the frame shop. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, and she has decided to use the living room as an art studio. Through one of the windows it is possible to see a little wedge of lake, tucked up against the diagonal of a church steeple: a real lake view, without having to climb onto the roof.