Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  The conference is at the Holiday Inn in Chapel Hill. It is supposed to be a pretty town. But the hotel is just off the highway, and she doesn’t know if there will be time to do anything else. She checks in at the desk and is given a key card, which she uses to let herself into a small room containing a large bed, television, end table, and upholstered chair. It is like every other hotel room in America: too lush. There are too many pillows, too many layers of curtains, patterns everywhere. Immediately she would like to strip everything away so that it is all simple. She does remove the comforter from the bed and stuffs it into the shallow closet, and this allows her to feel slightly calm.

  It’s time to venture down to the ballroom, where there will be an opening-night presentation.

  Elisa puts on her lanyard (the tag reads CrackedLisa) and picks up her binder and rides downstairs in the elevator. No music: the elevator is a silent box. She listens to herself breathing. The doors open onto the lobby, where a sign marked METAPHYSICSNET/SCIFITV, with an arrow, stands on an easel. She follows it to the ballroom.

  The room is enormous. In the center stand hundreds of folding chairs arranged into neat rows. Around the edge, buffet tables are covered with food. The front of the room is dominated by a low stage. A lectern stands in the center, with a giant screen behind it. There is a hum of loud conversation.

  It’s mostly white men, and most of the white men have beards. They are all holding plates of food and cans of soda. Nobody else seems to have brought down the binder. Elisa chooses a chair halfway back, along the inside aisle, and sets her binder down on the seat. Then she goes to the buffet and helps herself to a sandwich and a can of soda.

  She wanders around the edges of the hall. More people keep coming in—there have to be 150 here now. Her arms are trembling a little bit: they are tired from the drive. Why did she come exactly? She wants to go back to her room and hook up her laptop and talk to these people on the internet. These aren’t the people she knows—these people have faces and bodies, their personalities are manifest on their faces. A frizzy-haired woman, whip thin, cackles at a bearded man’s joke. A chubby boy stands alone, wincing: he looks like a graduate student in some impractical subject. A pale man in a plaid shirt is swaying as if in a gentle breeze. Elisa keeps her smile carefully calibrated to deflect unwanted attention. And how is she supposed to eat her sandwich with this soda can in her hand?

  She returns to her seat, balances the binder on her lap, and uses it as a table. She faces forward and waits. In spite of herself, she scans the room, in vain, for Silas.

  Eventually the lights dim and grow bright again. People sit down. Somebody, a round-faced man, settles in beside her, wiggling his behind on the chair. She suppresses a wave of panic. The lights go dark and stage lights come on and people applaud. When a man walks onto the stage, they applaud again, louder this time.

  He’s lanky, easy, charismatic in a nerdy way. He wears khaki pants and a white shirt that looks like a tablecloth. He bought that shirt for himself, Elisa thinks.

  “Good evening, and welcome to the seventh annual MetaphysicsNet-SciFiTV conference!” Applause. “I’m Peter Turner, founder of MetaphysicsNet, and I’m happy to say that this year’s conference is our biggest and best yet!” More applause. Peter Turner describes what is in store, which is to say what is listed in the binder on Elisa’s lap. We like things to be redundant, she thinks. It’s a comfort to us to be told what we already know. Because we don’t trust ourselves—we need to be reassured.

  Indeed, Elisa feels reassured. She is grateful for the repetition. There is something mesmerizing about this experience: sitting in this large dark room with all these strangers, the carpeted floor and walls swallowing sound, so that there is no echo. The PA system on the verge of feedback but never reaching it. She can hear the hum of the air-conditioning and feel a faint vibration underfoot, as though powerful generators are operating directly below her. The man beside her is breathing evenly through his mouth, and every now and then the breaths give way to a chuckle, after which the breaths speed, then slow, then settle. The speaker begins, then ends, a sentence; when he’s through he begins another.

  All around her, the spectacle of humanity in control of its emotions and actions. All around her, calm anticipation. She tucks her unfinished meal underneath her seat and folds her hands together on her binder. She closes her eyes.

  Peter Turner introduces the opening speaker, who receives a loud ovation. She hasn’t heard of him—he works in Hollywood. He’s the consultant for a famous TV series about UFOs. People laugh as he speaks but Elisa isn’t hearing the words. She is thinking about the other Lisa, in the other world. She is convinced that this other iteration of her is also at this conference, that world’s version of this conference, and that she is sitting in this same folding chair—that the two of them are still similar enough to have chosen the same seat. She feels that Lisa’s hands on her own binder, feels them intertwined with her own. The other Lisa is thinking about her, too. Their hearts stutter against one another, then synchronize. Their breaths ease into phase. They have two sons and both are alive. They are married and they are separated. They work at a college and they work at a lab. They drive matching Hondas and are forty-six years old.

  She is dimly aware that something has changed. There’s noise. Somebody is touching her arm.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  It’s the man beside her, the round-faced man. He’s tapping her. She opens her eyes. The lights are on, and people are standing up. The man is younger than she is, but he is still calling her “miss.” He says, “You’re spilling your soda.”

  She looks down. Her soda can is leaning at a sharp angle in her hand, and a pool of liquid is flowing toward the edge of her conference binder. She stares at it in incomprehension. I don’t drink soda. Maybe it was the other Lisa who chose it? Maybe she has switched—she’s that Lisa now. She’s back in the other world! Panic is rising in her chest; she gasps for breath.

  “Uh… here,” the man says, and he drops a paper napkin onto the spill. Then he takes the binder and can from her hands, brushing her thigh with his fingers in the process. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “You fell asleep?”

  He sets the binder and soda on the carpet. She blinks at him. It’s making sense now. She calms down. I’m myself, not her. His ID says RueTheDay.

  “I don’t think so,” she says.

  He’s smiling at her now. He says, “Yes, you did. You’re CrackedLisa!”

  “Oh,” she says. “I’m—yes, sorry.” She holds out her hand. “I know you.”

  “What a pleasure!”

  “Yes!”

  “That talk was so awesome. Do you watch Depths on SciFiTV?”

  “I—ah, no. I don’t.”

  The man talks for a while. She remembers his avatar: it’s a version of himself, rendered as a character from the cartoon South Park. The resemblance really is strong, uncanny even. He’s very animated, around thirty. He wears a wedding ring and there are sweat stains under his armpits.

  They stand up. He calls over a friend, an energetic woman it is clear he has a crush on, a crush that embarrasses him. She is curvy and pouty and also around thirty; her name is nottennis. Elisa knows her, too—she’s the kitten wearing a jetpack.

  Elisa listens to them talk. She answers a few questions. They seem excited to have an older person interested in the same things they are, although she hasn’t recognized a single reference from either of them yet. She follows them out of the room and into the hotel bar, where she meets more people, shakes a lot of hands, and allows a tall, professorial type to flirt with her. His beard is prematurely white and there is a kind of flair to his personal awkwardness that she likes. She considers, then decides against, going to bed with him.

  It occurs to her that she’s wearing a wedding ring. She can’t decide whether or not to take it off. If she leaves it on, maybe men will be less guarded with her, with less apparently at stake. But then again they might not even try. And is that wha
t she wants, to hook up? Maybe a part of her does. She hasn’t had much sex lately—why doesn’t she want it more?

  She leaves the ring on. She imagines that, in a parallel world, perhaps not the one she knows, she has taken it off and it has changed everything.

  Several times throughout the evening a woman glances at her from across the room. She is around fifty, quite heavy, moon-faced. She wears round eyeglasses and a pink blouse with ruffled collar and sleeves and a capacious, coarse yellow skirt that reminds Elisa, in its thick folds, of the valance over the window in her hotel room. The woman isn’t wearing a lanyard, and she seems to have a glow, like the moon itself. Her movements are slow and deliberate, as though they have been choreographed.

  Elisa doesn’t look for Patricia, because somehow she knows that this woman is her, though the woman is nothing like she imagined. They do not approach each other or introduce themselves: she isn’t sure why. She feels disengaged in general from the conference, in fact—out of place and insufficiently interested. The bar is getting more crowded now and people keep jostling her from behind, reaching around her for their drinks. Bits of conversation intended for others are inadvertently shouted in her ear. really sucked after season three. and boobs out to here. which isn’t in the remake. lifetime of gastrointestinal whatever. She looks around the room for Silas and could swear she sees Betsy Orosco exiting.

  Betsy! Suddenly Elisa feels revitalized. She wants to talk to her, to get to the bottom of that whole thing. They really made a connection that day, last summer, didn’t they? Surely Betsy doesn’t think she’s just some nut. Elisa doesn’t mind, not really, what happened—she just wishes they’d been honest with her, that’s all.

  She gets up, mutters excuse me, pushes through the crowd. People keep staggering into her path carrying multiple drinks. Everyone’s voice is loud, far louder than one might expect of nerds. Finally she’s through and into the lobby, where the ambient temperature drops by five degrees, and where Muzak is drifting down from the ceiling. She looks around: there, down that hall. It must be her, the blue hair, the broad hips and purposeful stride. Elisa runs to catch up, sneakers squeaking on the fake marble floor.

  It’s not a hallway, actually, it’s the foyer the elevators open onto, four sets of doors, four illuminated panels displaying the numbers of floors. One set is closing. Elisa hurries to it, peers inside as the strip of light narrows. There she is, the same rounded shoulders and cat-eye glasses. “Betsy!”

  Betsy Orosco glances over Elisa’s shoulder, looks right past as if she isn’t there. Then the elevator doors close and she’s gone.

  51.

  Sometime in the night she wakes up and tries to slide herself out of the big bed. She is bound up in the sheets, she feels them tugging out from under the mattress, and by the time one foot has hit the carpet the other has become stuck, and she flings her arms out for balance and finds the wall. She is standing there in the dark, in a frozen pirouette, her heart racing. She feels fully awake but knows she is not. The sheets release her foot. She collapses against the wall, pressing her face and both hands to it.

  Elisa has no idea where she is. She doesn’t know which direction to move in. She knows that she isn’t at home: there is no sound from anywhere and no air is moving. She says Derek’s name and then remembers she and Derek are no longer together, and then doubts that memory.

  She thinks of the boys and experiences a moment of panic. In her mind they are five and six years old and in danger. This isn’t right, she can’t put her finger on how. She moves a step, then another, along this wall and suddenly fears moving further; she does not want to get closer to the boys. Whatever is the matter, she will make it worse. She says Derek’s name again, and now it feels truly wrong: she’s coming to. She’s in a hotel. She went on a trip. Is she in Wisconsin? No—North Carolina. It’s a Holiday Inn. The bathroom is just around the corner. She can move, now, in the dark.

  Back on the bed she is sweating profusely. As if in response, the air-conditioning kicks on with a grunt. The clock reads 3:14. Then it reads 4:40. Then it’s light and she is lying shivering with the sheets tugged off the bed and bundled in a heap beside it. She feels as though she hasn’t slept at all.

  She wears her lanyard to breakfast and sits with some people from the parallel worlds forum, including RueTheDay. They are mostly younger than she is, except for one very old man. His ID reads CharlesSmith. Elisa doesn’t recognize the name. The group is animated and enthusiastic, and they are talking about the same things they talk about online, except that, in the absence of official moderation, they mention more television programs.

  It’s not quite what she was expecting. But she isn’t certain what’s missing. She finds herself peering across the banquet room, trying to identify other forum members, but she can’t read their tags from here. She doesn’t see Betsy anywhere. The woman she thinks is Patricia fills a bowl with scrambled eggs, then scans the room as though looking for a seat. She makes eye contact with Elisa, puts on a small demure smile, and walks in the opposite direction, to where there is an empty table. A few moments later a man walking on crutches sits down with her and the two sit facing each other in apparent silence.

  The first major event of the day is a parallel worlds panel—it is one of the main reasons she is here. Her breakfast companions ask her if she is excited about it. Their attention takes her by surprise—it is strange that these unfamiliar people know something about her, about her preoccupations.

  “I suppose I am,” she tells them, and they all laugh.

  A tired-looking man called part_human says, “You’re just like you are on the board.”

  “What am I like on the board?”

  “Reserved,” says nottennis. She is clearly enjoying the attention of the men around her.

  “Restrained,” says PresumedInsane. He is her age, shockingly thin, Adam’s apple, black beard spattered with gray.

  RueTheDay says, “You’re our resident grown-up.”

  “I’m not that much older than you.”

  “Not your age,” says nottennis, “The way you are.”

  “Oh.”

  To her left, CharlesSmith silently works his jaw. He is alert but looks no one in the eye. After a time, he struggles to his feet and leaves.

  Nottennis says, “Um, has anybody ever even heard of that guy?”

  The parallel worlds panel is in a small conference room down the hall. There’s a dais with four microphones set up on it, facing about a hundred folding chairs. Elisa considers waiting for her breakfast companions, but doesn’t want to sit near nottennis unless she absolutely has to. So she hangs back and sits on the aisle in an otherwise unoccupied row.

  The panel consists of a TV producer, a science fiction writer, a blogger whom everyone but Elisa seems to have read, and Betsy Orosco. Betsy has come in late; she is in fact eating a piece of toast. The other panelists, all men, steal glances at her that Elisa interprets as appraising. Betsy seems confident, in her element. She finishes the toast and sits with her hands folded, waiting. When ten o’clock arrives, they begin.

  There is no moderator; the four speakers introduce themselves and each offers some opening comments on the subject. None of the four seems particularly comfortable around the other three. To Elisa’s dismay, the TV producer dominates—he shares stories about working with particular famous actors. The science fiction writer clearly dislikes him—he denigrates the narrative logic of the producer’s most popular show. The blogger tells jokes that fall flat, and Betsy, at first, appears as though she regrets coming at all. She tries, gamely enough, to talk about the actual physics of the multiverse, in much the way she presented it to Elisa in her office the year before. But here, it isn’t going over so well. She explains in detail, too much detail, the complex quantum requirements for a universe to be created, and the audience shifts in their seats. And when she tells them that travel among universes is largely impossible, several people actually groan.

  “But you never know, righ
t?” says the blogger.

  “That’s right,” the TV producer says brightly, to mild laughter, “you never know!” By the time the audience begins raising questions, everyone seems exhausted, as if it’s midafternoon and they have been conferencing all day.

  At some point Elisa feels a presence beside her and turns to find that the presumptive Patricia has taken a seat two down from her. She is wearing a floral print dress, clean new running shoes, and a crucifix around her neck. She is staring straight ahead. Her hands are folded in her lap and she remains perfectly still. Elisa smells perfume.

  Someone in the front of the room, she thinks it’s RueTheDay, is asking Betsy a question. “You say we can’t travel back and forth between universes,” he says. “But what about our consciousness? You know, our awareness?”

  Betsy’s answer, littered with finger quotes, is given with a wrinkled brow. Elisa is trying to concentrate on it. “I’m not sure if that’s a question for physics. I mean, we’d need to define what ‘consciousness’ means, in terms of physics. If you want to get philosophical… in theory… I guess ‘you’ are already there, the iteration of you that is native to that universe.”

  “But is there… can you think of a mechanism… by which…”

  “He’s not taking no for an answer!” quips the blogger.

  “… by which the consciousness could travel… could be transferred…”

  “Into the Matrix!” the blogger says.

  “… or I guess shared with that of the other you, or yous?”

  Betsy leans forward. “Believe me, I want to say yes…”

  “So say yes!” says the blogger.

  “… but physics is concerned with the kind of questions that we can support with mathematics or experimentation. ‘Consciousness’ is a psychological notion, a philosophical notion. It is interesting, but it isn’t something we can apply freely to our work. I can’t say that something like consciousness can be transferred because I don’t know what it consists of. And neither does anyone else.”