Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  “I suppose not.”

  There is a moment of awkward silence. It’s strange to experience: they have shared so many hours of companionable silence in a quarter century—more—that the awkwardness seems to belong to someone else.

  Derek says, “What are you doing right now? Can we meet?”

  “Drinking coffee. Come on over.”

  She says this without thinking—he’s never been here of course. To this apartment. His silence is answer enough; she corrects herself. “How about the Edge?” This is a café not far from here, though of course he’ll have to drive. Though this only matters to her—he likes driving.

  Fine, he says, he’ll see her in an hour.

  Like everyone on the street, she hasn’t gotten the winter clothes out of storage yet, so she puts on a hooded sweatshirt and a canvas jacket on top of that, then walks to the café with her head down and her bare hands curled deep into her pockets. There are the sounds of wind and traffic, but no voices; people passing say nothing to each other, nor to their phones. Some crows somewhere are freaking out. It feels like the end of the world.

  The café is warm and moist, the windows fogged and dripping, and the staff are playing loud music, as though to compete with the wind. She imagines that Derek will be annoyed by the music and she’s right; though he says nothing, he can’t resist training a sour expression in the direction of the counter. They both order black coffees—her inquiring look at Derek, a lifetime milk-and-sugar man, in both worlds as far as she can tell, goes unacknowledged—and take a table far from the window. On the bulletin board behind Derek is a pristine pull-tabbed ad for bass guitar lessons and a lost cat notice. She thinks, We are still married.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” he says. “I’ve stopped going to Amos.”

  “Why?”

  He levels an annoyed gaze at her. “We went to him to stay together. We’re not together.”

  Her instinct tells her to apologize now, but her instincts are bad, so she says nothing. After a pause, during which his body jerks the chair, loudly, into a new position, he goes on.

  “I don’t know if you think this is permanent.”

  Is it a question? She says, “I have no idea what this is.”

  “Well, I think this is a trial separation.”

  “Okay.”

  He scowls, sighs. “Don’t do that. Capitulate.”

  “I’m not capitulating. I’m just encouraging you to get to the point.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  She savors the sorry as he gathers himself to speak.

  “Now that we’ve been apart for a while, it all seems so…”

  She waits.

  “It’s not that I regret this. But it’s hard to remember why I was so upset that you went to see the boys. It made me… it felt like the ultimate transgression. Given our arrangement. But now it seems more sensible.” So far he has been staring into his untouched coffee mug, but now he looks at her face. “Maybe the arrangement wasn’t sustainable. Maybe it was time to change. I still have no idea what happened to you at that conference, and if we get back together—”

  They’re both surprised to hear him say this and he appears, for a moment, to be choking back tears. He sips his coffee with a wince before he resumes speaking, now with his head down.

  “All I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter what happened. What the situation is now is all that matters. And I’m thinking we should apologize to the boys. And try to start over.”

  “With each other?” she asks him.

  “With the boys.”

  Neither of them speaks for a minute. The girls behind the counter are laughing at something. They have turned the music down—Elisa realizes now that she and Derek are the only customers.

  “It just isn’t right,” he says, and there is no danger now that he will choke up. His face is hard; his head looks heavy, like a boulder. He’s showing his age: the cheeks a bit sunken, the lines deeper. He carries it well. He has always looked best under the weight of some burden.

  He says, “It isn’t right that we’re all scattered like this. I don’t know how it happened.”

  Elisa pats his hand where it is loosely clenched on the tabletop, then crosses her arms over her chest.

  48.

  They decide to write a letter, a paper letter, and mail it. To Derek, this makes things more official. Neither of them suggests doing it together, in person; instead each of them writes a draft and they compare them via e-mail.

  Elisa’s reads:

  Dear Boys,

  Things have been changing in our lives and we wanted to talk to you about these changes. We have separated, but are in close touch with each other, and have come to realize that it was wrong to cut off contact with you years ago. We realize that it would be difficult for you to forgive, and don’t expect you to. But we want to open the lines of communication. Will you talk with us about this?

  We are so sorry. We hope that we can all be some kind of family again.

  With love,

  Elisa and Derek

  It takes her ten minutes to write the letter and two hours to decide whether or not to sign it “Mom and Dad.” When it’s settled, she opens her e-mail to send the draft to Derek, and finds that he already has sent his to her:

  Silas and Sam:

  It is probably a shock to find a letter from your parents in your mailbox, and I hope you have opened it and are reading it now. If you haven’t—if you instead threw the letter away unopened—then we can hardly blame you, given our recent history. We are writing to tell you that we now believe our decision three years ago to cut off communication with you was wrong: it was extreme, insulting, and unnecessary, and the worst part is, it didn’t even work. It may surprise you to learn that we are now separated and living apart, and we are separated from you as well. And in a sense perhaps you are, and maybe always have been, separated from each other. This last is also our fault, certainly as much as it has ever been yours. We are finally beginning to accept that we were not good parents; we did not deal with your troubles well, nor our own, either.

  This realization is particularly difficult for me, as I grew up, at first, without a good father, and later with no father at all. My father was a bad man—he was domineering, belittling, violent, and sadistic, and he beat my mother and nearly drove her to madness when I was a boy. It was a relief when he finally left, and over the years of my late childhood I watched my mother transform herself from a tired, beaten-down victim to a self-sufficient, strong, loving parent. I admire her deeply, and cherish the relationship I have with her today. I am glad she has been a part of your lives, and I know that I hurt her terribly with the decision your mother and I made together. Maybe she has been in touch with you—I have not asked her.

  I never talked much about my father to you, because I didn’t want him to have any effect on my family, but now I fear that he has had all too powerful an effect, and I have allowed his influence to ruin our lives together. I am sorry. I have lived a life of fear and passivity, and look at where it has brought us.

  We would like to ask you to please consider restoring communication with us.

  This letter is not signed, and neither is the e-mail he sent it to her in. Derek has never said these things to her. He never said anything about being afraid, or feeling passive, never told her that his father beat his mother.

  The loneliness she feels, sitting in her apartment in front of her laptop, is so profound that she wants to go to Derek’s house, to go home, take him to bed. Beg him if necessary. Instead she sends him her version, and a few minutes later he agrees that it is the better choice.

  They send the letter; the boys do not reply. Eventually Derek sends his version. They are still waiting.

  49.

  Now she returns to her apartment. Now she gives up trying to remake this life into the old. She drinks, heavily, every Friday night with Judith. This was Elisa’s idea, and Judith seems delighted by it, though it isn’t as if she doesn’t have lo
ts of other friends, with more in common than she has with Elisa. Elisa should be more grateful, she thinks. Indeed, this new ritual is a kind of penance, for the days, some months ago, when she thought she might become friends with Betsy, the physicist. But clearly the woman has decided that she is some kind of freak. In retrospect this attempt at friendship seems silly, and an insult to Judith, her actual confidante and reliable, if ill-matched, pal. One of the things they talk about is Larry, whom Elisa sees again, several times more, with a growing sense of futility and effort and unease. It just isn’t him, he isn’t the man she loved, and she isn’t the woman who loved him. It isn’t even close, really, and soon she stops returning his calls. She avoids walking past the frame shop now and doesn’t eat at the Asian café. She artificially maintains the sense, in her own mind, that theirs is a relationship coming to an end, so that she can have something to talk about with Judith. But in truth it never really got off the ground.

  She thinks about Derek all the time. She would like to make amends but isn’t sure what she wants to do with them. So she does nothing. They, too, have stopped getting together for coffee.

  Elisa no longer wants to go back. Indeed, she is increasingly frightened, throughout the month of January, by the possibility that she might now be sent back against her will, in an instant, the same way she got here. She begins to think in terms of cause and effect: What did I do to cause this? What should I do to prevent it from happening again? She once feared the apparent randomness of her situation. Now she fears that some intelligence might be behind it, after all. She lies awake at night in her apartment with her jaw clenched, imagining having to mourn Silas a second time.

  And as for Silas, he has disappeared. The forums say that he has left Infinite Games, though no one knows why. Minefield hasn’t posted for weeks. She doesn’t know where Sam is, either.

  The one thing she does with any regularity that gives her some satisfaction, or at least some relief from her boredom and anxiety: she spends several hours a night on MetaphysicsNet. This allows her to transition from eating to sleeping without drinking too heavily, though she does drink. There is an almost frenetic level of activity on the parallel worlds forum. She begins to wonder if what happened to her happened to many people, at the same time, all of them conspiring in anonymous silence, afraid to speak out. At times she feels as though the claim is on the verge of being made, by almost everyone. And then, at other times, she feels completely alone.

  Every day somebody seems to have discovered a new book, or study, or TV program, or blog on the subject. Every day the full membership gathers in a thread devoted to the latest thing and discusses it frantically. Elisa begins to think of the other forum members as actual friends. Joereilly lives in Palo Alto and in his avatar is posed, fat and bearded, in front of a sports car. Misstake is a lesbian with bangle earrings. Rare Fern is from Vancouver, British Columbia, and is supposedly a twenty-five-year-old woman whom all the men on the forum constantly flirt with. Of course she might as well be a man, any of them might be anyone. She has exchanged several private messages, and more recently e-mails, with a woman who calls herself DippedInSunshine, but whose real name is Patricia. Patricia is a divorced mother of three adult children, the youngest now in college. She is unfailingly cheerful, both on the forum and in private correspondence, but not, Elisa senses, frivolously so. Her cheer is genuine and stems from an actual, if groundless, belief that things will turn out all right for Elisa.

  Elisa has told her about the letters they sent to the boys. She has told her about her guilt, Silas’s disappearance. She doesn’t tell her that Silas is dead, in a parallel world. Patricia’s responses have been perhaps the only kindnesses she has been done in many months that actually have had any effect. They are written in an evident rush, in a kind of rolling, opportunistic grammar, punctuated only with ellipses. I know this is hard to accept… but you will love again… your wayward boy and romance as well… to be grieving… is good for the soul… you need to heal… it will take time… but believe me your life has just begun….

  In this, anyway, Patricia is mistaken: Elisa turns forty-six in February and feels very much as though her life is mostly over. Derek actually takes her out to dinner. He gives her a handbag as a present. She is fairly certain a woman helped him pick it out—it’s all wrong. She ought to be moved by this, by his sad effort, but she can’t muster the proper emotion. Derek looks older; the planes of his face have shifted. All through dinner she thinks, We’re going to die soon. Nothing is said about either divorcing or reuniting.

  For some months Elisa has known that there is an annual conference of the MetaphysicsNet community. It is actually a combined event between MetaphysicsNet and a larger internet forum devoted to science fiction movies and television. There are presentations from cable TV networks, panels devoted to popular shows, and lectures from the more game or nerdy scientists and researchers in various cutting-edge topics—antigravity, rocket propulsion, theoretical physics, and the like. The scientists who actually populate the parallel worlds forum seem to regard the conference as a kind of vacation from their real lives—an opportunity to talk about the things their colleagues find strange or uninteresting.

  Patricia tells her to come. You will love it… it could be the beginning of a new life for you… restore your faith in others… the people are wonderful… you will meet lifelong friends and companions… The conference is in July, in North Carolina. She buys a ticket and reserves a hotel room.

  In March, Judith invites her to go out of town for the weekend. They drive together to Toronto and they do there the same thing they do in Reevesport—drink too much and talk about men. Or rather Judith talks about men while Elisa laughs. She finds it easier and easier to laugh with Judith, and this should make their time together restorative. But the laughter leaves her with a hangover—it feels fake, it hurts her throat and face, and in the morning, after Judith, she is prone to crying jags. She succumbs to one of these in their hotel room their second morning in the city and Judith climbs into her bed and holds Elisa in her arms. This is a fine gesture; nobody has touched her in months. But it just feels awkward. She stops crying, not because she’s finished, but because she wants Judith to get out of her bed. Later they go to a museum, they go to a show. Then, on Monday, they listen to right-wing radio as they drive back to Reevesport.

  In April, Elisa gets a lump at the back of her jaw. She thinks, This is the beginning of the end. The doctor says it’s a swollen lymph gland and tells her it will go away. In May, it goes away.

  In June she fucks a librarian who, when it’s over, says to her, “You could have at least pretended to like it.” Also she gets a call from Derek but the ringing stops before she can answer. Maybe he changed his mind. Maybe he dialed her by mistake.

  Someone named highdigger appears on the parallel worlds forum. He seems to be a young man, with a young man’s presumptions and confidence. He asks a lot of questions, and his sig line comes from Wilhelm Reich. He says he thinks maybe he’ll go to the conference. When, in the last week of June, he calls somebody an idiot for assuming that a particular movie plot is scientifically plausible—Your naïveté disgusts me—the chill she feels reaches all the way to her toes. She is sure this is Silas. A wave of recrimination appears to drive him into hiding. Elisa sends a private message—Who is this?—that goes unanswered.

  In July she takes a week off and drives to North Carolina for the conference.

  50.

  She’s driving. A Thursday morning in July, hot outside, so the windows of her Honda are down and the highway air is rushing in. It’s the third hour of a daylong trip from the town where she is living, barely, a life without apparent purpose, to the town where she will meet, for the first time, her imaginary friends.

  Her name is Elisa Macalaster Brown. It has been a long time since she’s driven alone on a highway for more than a few minutes, and she is surprised to find that she is frightened. Everyone is driving aggressively, coming up close behind her
, flashing their brights, swerving into the passing lane and blowing by. Their cars are sleek, the windows closed, the engines making almost no sound. The big rigs, on the other hand, are extravagantly loud. Their trailers bounce and rumble and sway over her, and she hugs the wheel as they pass, terrified of being sucked into the slipstream. She regards this fear as good. It means she doesn’t want to die.

  She breaks for lunch at a truck stop outside Harrisburg. She orders a cheeseburger and a strawberry milkshake, but when they arrive she only wants the milkshake. Fat men in plaid shirts turn from the counter every few minutes and look at her. On the way out, she buys a bottle of Visine and a pair of aviator sunglasses. In the rearview mirror she looks like a character in a movie about the apocalypse.

  Her satchel is open beside her on the passenger seat. Inside are magazines, books, her computer, and a folder of conference materials, including a schedule, some coupons, and an ID tag attached to a lanyard. The lanyard is printed over and over with the phrase TIME COP Thursdays This Fall on SciFiTV. Of this conference she has no expectations, no hopes. She is simply trusting Patricia. Judith is a bit jealous of this mysterious other friend from the internet—she seems to have been hoping she would be invited along. Not that she would have come if Elisa had asked.

  Elisa has a picture in her mind of Patricia: a tiny woman, elfin, with big ears and an innocent, sprightly manner. In her imagination, Patricia wears red Keds, like a child, and speaks very slowly, in an even, breathy monotone.

  Somewhere in Maryland, she has to stop and pee, but the rest stop she has chosen is entirely out of order. There are no signs, no caution tape, it’s just abandoned. She does what many before her have apparently done: she follows a rough trail into the woods behind the restrooms and squats among the trees. The sound of the highway has nearly been swallowed up by the vegetation, even though she can still see the cars and trucks passing. Halfway through she thinks she hears a twig break and again is filled with mortal terror. But nobody is there. She again decides to regard her fear as good.