Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  Sam doesn’t reply to her e-mails. She tries calling him at Infinite Games, but is told he isn’t in. She doesn’t leave a message.

  The bearded man who has her old job at Killian Tech is still there in the corner office, plugging away. She looks at the company website and finds out that his name is Wayne Pratt. He has a personal website where he posts close-up photographs he has taken of various plants. His CV is available for download, as well. She downloads it: it now sits on the desktop of her computer.

  She stops by the frame shop twice. Both times, he isn’t there. In retrospect, she thinks she probably knew he wouldn’t be, at those times. Desire seems very far away right now. She doesn’t miss him; something about being in this body, being this Lisa, has undone her desperation. But she misses desire itself, she misses need.

  After reading the classifieds every morning for a month, she sees an ad for a blue 1991 Honda Accord with 153,000 miles on it. She buys it, then sells the Intrepid. She spends some of the difference on beaded seat covers like her old ones. The first time she drives the car with the seat covers on, she cries. She considers, then abandons, the notion of trying to crack the windshield in the same pattern as the old one.

  Her separation from Derek deepens her friendship with Judith. She resists this for a couple of weeks, as it wasn’t part of the old life, and the woman is annoying. But it is nice to have a friend. After a time she begins to look forward to their lunches with nervous excitement, joy even, and she doesn’t understand why. It is almost a cleansing ritual. They usually eat in the food court at the supermarket, where Judith can talk as loudly as she likes and Elisa can scream with laughter. Elisa never talks about herself, just listens to her friend natter on.

  After one of these lunches, picking up a few groceries before returning to work, Elisa passes Betsy in the tea and coffee aisle. Their eyes meet and the younger woman looks away. Did she recognize her? She’s thinner now, so perhaps not.

  She begins to spend much of her free time online, on the MetaphysicsNet parallel worlds forum. She actually registers and chooses a screen name: CrackedLisa. She regrets the name a couple of weeks later, but by that time she’s already begun to develop her identity.

  The forum is carefully moderated. No apparent crazies. They divide into two main camps, people who philosophize and theorize about the concept, and people who think they have evidence of its real-world existence. It is not common for people to believe they are in a parallel world; at least no one says so. But she senses they are there, lurking. She reads back through the archives, three years’ worth, digesting it all. People recommend books and she borrows them from the library. It becomes her hobby. She starts painting diptychs: nearly identical panels, save for slight differences. She doesn’t tell anybody what she means by them. Of course there’s nobody to tell except Judith, who wouldn’t understand.

  If there is pain from her separation, she is not conscious of it. She doesn’t long for Derek. It’s as though he’s a food that spoiled and that made her sick, and now she never wants to eat it again. She is certain this will change, but so far nothing.

  It’s as though she’s suspended between the two worlds. Or living in a world that is one subtracted from the other. Nothing at all seems real now.

  45.

  October. It’s unseasonably warm, even under a dark gray sky. The orange and yellow boughs of maples whip in a hot wind but the leaves don’t fall, not yet. The streets seem empty. The details don’t match. It’s fall break at school so she gets a couple of days off, and decides it’s time. She goes to the frame shop. He’s there. He has grown his winter beard already. She asks him to come to lunch.

  They eat at the usual place, the Asian café. Elisa watches him carefully as he eats. He is so familiar: the careful way he has of keeping his beard free of food: he opens his mouth a little too wide, takes smaller bites. (Or is this, in fact, familiar? Is this a thing he used to do? It’s suddenly unclear what is memory of their past together, what she has generated as part of her fantasy of him.) He has asked for an extra napkin and holds it under his chin every time he lifts the chopsticks to his lips. His movements aren’t stiff, they’re controlled. Fluid and hard. He talks about jazz. She doesn’t want him to talk about jazz, he’s not supposed to be interested in it. But she nods, listening.

  She mentions her separation and his brow furrows as it does every time he must process new information. He makes a sound, a kind of clicking with his mouth, like a hard drive being accessed. The clicking isn’t right—he didn’t used to do that. She’d like to point it out to him, to make him self-conscious about it, but it’s too soon for that kind of intimacy.

  Elisa buys. She asks him if he really needs to go back right away. His mouth clicks.

  They go to her apartment for sex and she gives him exactly what he wants when he wants it. He is taken by surprise and doesn’t last very long. He’s embarrassed, in fact he apologizes. “Don’t apologize,” she says. Her Larry wouldn’t apologize. Or would he? The truth is, she doesn’t know anymore. She didn’t have these experiences with her Larry. Maybe he would have apologized. Maybe he would have come even sooner. While he dresses, he tells her she should come over and get a look at this new turntable he bought. He corrects himself: “New old turntable.” It’s got a belt drive, and he just installed a new belt. She doesn’t understand what this is, or why she’s being told, but okay. “Call me, then, we’ll make a date.” When he’s gone she savors the taste of him before making coffee. That much is right, anyway. She’s nervous, her hands tremble, but her heart is steady. It’s not what she expected, none of it is.

  She sees Derek at the supermarket. His shirt’s tucked in and he has combed his hair. She can tell he’s trying to make himself attractive to women. To a certain kind of woman—not the kind she has become. The kind Amos Finley and he—and she—tried to make her into. He turns and sees her and she expects him to pretend he didn’t, to turn away, the way Betsy did. But instead he muscles his cart around and comes right up to her, and appears disappointed when he arrives.

  Their pleasantries feel ridiculous. They have never engaged in them with each other before.

  She says, “You were going to say something.”

  He is gripping the handle of his grocery cart and his knuckles stand out in sharp relief. “I don’t know.”

  This is not something he often says. He won’t look at her. He looks softer, as if he’s been eating more without her there to stop him. This should make him look more like the Derek of the old life, but somehow he doesn’t.

  “It’s kind of ridiculous,” he says, finally. “That we’re apart. And apart from the boys.” Now he looks up. “I’m not asking you to come back, I’m just saying. The point of cutting off the boys was so we could stay together.”

  “And?” she says.

  It’s a mistake. It makes him angry. “Jesus, Lisa.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  But he’s already turning away, hauling the cart behind him. “Nothing was ever easy with you,” he tells her over his shoulder, and as she watches his broad back recede through the crowd she thinks, Easy? Are things supposed to be easy?

  46.

  One day she is walking past Killian Tech and sees that the little Zen sandbox and photo of the blond woman are missing from the corner office desk. So is the diploma that used to hang on the wall. Impulsively, she walks in. She asks for the head tech.

  She is a bit surprised at the man who appears: gray-haired, in his sixties, he is lanky, stooped, confident in his demeanor. He’s got a bandage on his elbow; something tells her he fell off a bicycle. She has never seen him before. The head tech she remembers was stocky, in his forties, a man named Ronnie. She introduces herself and asks if they need a lab manager.

  “Yes, we do,” he says, surprised. “How did you know that?”

  She explains: waiting at the bus stop, she used to notice the man in the corner, hard at work. And then today his things were gone. “I’m detail oriented,” she say
s.

  But he appears puzzled. “How did you know Wayne was the lab manager?”

  “I have some experience with this kind of work.” Which is not really an answer.

  When he doesn’t reply, she says, “Listen—do you have a few minutes? Interview me for the job.”

  “Why don’t you just drop off a CV?”

  “I will, I will. But let’s talk.”

  He opens his mouth to say no. Then he hesitates, says, “I know you. You work in the biology department, don’t you.”

  This gives her pause—she didn’t anticipate being recognized. But she says, “Right.”

  At last he shrugs, invites her to follow.

  Elisa experiences a rising excitement. She was going to wait on this, she was going to bide her time. She’s unprepared. It’s late afternoon on a Thursday, her office closed early because a construction project snapped an underground power line. She is dressed like her old self, in jeans and a cardigan sweater. Non-Ronnie leads her down a hallway and it isn’t quite right, it isn’t what she has in her head. The floor plan was different. Is different. But it’s close enough, with its drop ceiling and muted patterned wallpaper and faint buzz from overhead fluorescents. This is where she used to work—it has to be.

  Ronnie’s office wasn’t a separate room; he just occupied the corner of the storeroom that lay at the end of the hallway. He didn’t spend a lot of time there, he was usually out on the floor working. The room was lined with steel shelves packed with boxes, papers, glass items, chemicals in bottles. When occasionally he would summon her for a meeting, he would enter in front of her and squeeze into the small space behind his desk, and gesture toward a plastic patio chair, inviting her to sit.

  But this hallway doesn’t lead to the storeroom. Or if it does, they don’t go there. Instead this manager, the new manager, opens a hollow-core door into a cramped office cheaply lined with wood paneling. There’s a file cabinet in the corner. The lights here are buzzing even louder than in the hall. He points at a plywood waiting-room chair, upholstered in worn gray fabric. Then he folds himself into one himself, behind the desk.

  “So what experience do you have?” he says, when she has descended, nervously, into her seat.

  “I managed a lab for eight years. Very much like this one.”

  “You know what it is we do?”

  She nods. “Outsourced research, genetic testing, forensic contract work, that kind of thing.”

  The man shrugs. “How many clients did your old lab have?”

  Same as this one, she thinks. “It varied, depending on the size of the projects. Anywhere from three or four big jobs at a time to a couple dozen small ones… all told, there were thirty or forty clients we had regular contact with, maybe five or six we had work from regularly, that made up the bulk of the business.”

  He is looking steadily at her, his chin supported on his pointer fingers. “This was where?”

  “Madison, Wisconsin,” she says without thinking.

  “You really should bring by your CV.”

  But she can’t resist. She is looking around this office, thinking about the time Ronnie confessed an affair to her—a woman he’d met at a seminar in Rochester, they’d been seeing each other for a few months, and he was racked with guilt but couldn’t stop. As he talked, her gaze was fixed on a poster over his right shoulder, some kind of parody of the New York subway map. The stops had labels like WEIRDOS and PIEROGIES. No posters are hung in this room. It appears that, like Ronnie, this man doesn’t spend much time in his office. Suddenly she wishes she smoked, that she was smoking. She wants something to hold. She says, “A typical day here would probably go like this. Somebody, let’s say you, or me, if you hired me, unlocks in the morning. You take a clipboard off the rack and do a walkthrough, turning on the machines and computers, flipping on the lights, checking on the petri dishes and so on. Then the techs would start rolling in around a quarter to eight to fire up the mice, check the cages, what have you.”

  He is scowling at her now, concentrating deeply, and she feels she is making a mistake, but can’t stop talking. This isn’t like her, she thinks—but it is, it is, it’s like the old her, the missing one, who liked to stay up late in the lab at night, the one who loved men too much, the one who gave herself to Derek, to motherhood, and never looked back. And she remembers why she never looked back. It is embarrassing to be this person. She is exuberant and imprecise and makes a fool of herself. She breaks things, ruins things. Elisa tells herself Stop, don’t blow it—but she keeps on. “For the rest of the day,” she says, “they’ll be logging results and crunching numbers. You’ll have work to do for the city, I’d imagine, environmental stuff, a few nonconfidential police jobs, and by ten in the morning I’ll have fielded calls from a couple of clients, handled some inquiries, and so on. The office manager, I mean. Afternoons we prepare portfolios for people, and I would compile those and send them off electronically, or if they want them hand-delivered with an explanation I will go do that. We also take care of small jobs in the afternoons—well water testing, drug testing, that kind of thing, usually this falls to whoever the intern is, a college kid generally. And then you usually leave by five thirty, stop in and see your mother or pick up something to eat—” And here of course she is thinking of Ronnie, Ronnie and his stern and handsome wife Gwen, and Ronnie’s mother at the nursing home and the sandwiches he used to tell her he was going to order before he left, and did Elisa want one?, and she realizes that this will not do, this man isn’t Ronnie and the lab is different. “I don’t know what you do,” she goes on, “but I double-check that everything that’s supposed to be powered off is powered off, and everything that’s supposed to be running is running, and lock the mouse lab and storeroom, and then I lock the front door and I go home.”

  She is panting and feels faintly nauseous. They’re silent together for a moment. The head tech’s face is taut, his eyes bright.

  “Well, we don’t have mice here,” he says.

  She can only muster an “Oh.”

  “Also, I don’t…” He screws up his face, tilts his head, gazes at her with one eye half closed. “I’m not sure… my mother doesn’t live around here.”

  “That was just a… an example.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” the man asks. “Did Dean put you up to this? I don’t understand the bit about my mother.”

  She keeps very still. Her sweater itches her and she clutches her bag to her lap.

  “Something like that.”

  “You seem to have worked at a lab. And we do some of those things. Environmental testing, work for the city. Not the police. You’ve done this kind of thing, you say.”

  “Yes.”

  “But… this is a practical joke?”

  “No, no,” she says. “I just meant… I didn’t mean…”

  He is leaning forward now, palms flat on the desk. “I find this whole encounter very odd,” he says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You are the woman from the biology department, aren’t you? Laura?”

  “I was only—I’m only looking for another job.”

  He stares at her for a long time, and as he does, his face grows longer and harder, like something that has melted and then cooled.

  He says, “I’m thinking it probably isn’t going to be this one.”

  He says, “Do you want to explain yourself? Should I call the biology department?”

  There’s nothing she can say that will explain anything. She is afraid that he will get up and block the door. She doesn’t think he would, but what does she know? About this man, or about anyone? People are who you think they are until they do the thing that proves you wrong. Her head has begun to pound.

  She says, slowly, “It’s not a joke, it’s just… I thought it might impress you.”

  Silence. This is inadequate. But she doesn’t have anything else.

  “How about,” she continues, “if I just get up and leave now, and never come back. This was
a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  His expression does not change. She gets up. She leaves and doesn’t go back.

  47.

  It’s winter before she hears from Derek again. Or not quite, really: the week after Thanksgiving, snow falling and blowing in wild circles in the street, several inches already on the ground. It’s a Saturday and she is watching this spectacle out the window and thinking what everybody else in Reevesport is thinking, which is that their hope for a prolonged autumn without scarves and gloves is now shattered. Of course there’s a part of her that likes this weather very much, likes the feeling of forced indoorsness, the excuse to drink more hot coffee. She is glad to be alone. Thanksgiving she spent, for the first time in years, in Chicago, with her parents, and though she expected to be depressed by their advancing age and eccentricity, she found them almost charming. They didn’t comment on her separation from Derek. They seemed genuinely glad to see her. They appeared very firmly in love with each other and in the idea of isolation from the rest of the world.

  The first thing Derek says when he calls her is, “Crazy weather, huh?” and before she can stop herself it makes her laugh.

  “I don’t think we’ll ever get good at that,” she says. “Small talk.”